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University of Michigan Law School

Health Law and Policy

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider Jul 1994

Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical discourse are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits, taste, and language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, Americans today truly do resolve political-and moral--questions into judicial questions. As Abraham Lincoln hoped, the Constitution "has become the political religion of the nation," and many Americans …


Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider Jul 1992

Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

For many years, the field of bioethics has been specially concerned with how the authority to make medical decisions should be allocated between doctor and patient. Today the patient's power-indeed, the patient's right-is widely acknowledged, at least in principle. But this development can hardly be the last word in our thinking about how medical decisions should be made. For one thing, sometimes patients cannot speak for themselves. For another, patients· make medical decisions in contexts that significantly include more participants than just the patient and doctor. Now, as this conference demonstrates, bioethics is beginning to ask what role the patient's …


Rights Discourse And Neonatal Euthanasia, Carl E. Schneider Jan 1988

Rights Discourse And Neonatal Euthanasia, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Hard cases, they say, make bad law. Hard cases, we know, can also make revealing law. Hard cases identify the problems we have not found a way of solving. They reveal ways the law's goals conflict. They force us to articulate our assumptions and to examine our modes of discourse and reasoning. If there was ever a hard case for the law, it is the question of whether, how, and by whom it should be decided to allow newborn children who are severely retarded mentally or severely damaged physically to die. For many years, the law has not had to …