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Full-Text Articles in Law
Feigned Consensus: Usurping The Law In Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions, Keith A. Findley, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, Julie A. Mack, David A. Moran, Barry C. Scheck, Thomas L. Bohan
Feigned Consensus: Usurping The Law In Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions, Keith A. Findley, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, Julie A. Mack, David A. Moran, Barry C. Scheck, Thomas L. Bohan
Articles
Few medico-legal matters have generated as much controversy--both in the medical literature and in the courtroom--as Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), now known more broadly as Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). The controversies are of enormous significance in the law because child abuse pediatricians claim, on the basis of a few non-specific medical findings supported by a weak and methodologically flawed research base, to be able to “diagnose” child abuse, and thereby to provide all of the evidence necessary to satisfy all of the legal elements for criminal prosecution (or removal of children from their parents). It is a matter, therefore, in …
Shaken Baby Syndrome, Abusive Head Trauma, And Actual Innocence: Getting It Right, Keith A. Findley, Patrick D. Barnes, David A. Moran, Waney Squier
Shaken Baby Syndrome, Abusive Head Trauma, And Actual Innocence: Getting It Right, Keith A. Findley, Patrick D. Barnes, David A. Moran, Waney Squier
Articles
In the past decade, the existence of shaken baby syndrome (SBS) has been called into serious question by biomechanical studies, the medical and legal literature, and the media. As a result of these questions, SBS has been renamed abusive head trauma (AHT). This is, however, primarily a terminological shift: like SBS, AHT refers to the two-part hypothesis that one can reliably diagnose shaking or abuse from three internal findings (subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and encephalopathy) and that one can identify the perpetrator based on the onset of symptoms. Over the past decade, we have learned that this hypothesis fits poorly …
Malpractice Suits And Physician Apologies In Cancer Care, Eugene Chung, Jill R. Horwitz, John A.E. Pottow, Reshma Jagsi
Malpractice Suits And Physician Apologies In Cancer Care, Eugene Chung, Jill R. Horwitz, John A.E. Pottow, Reshma Jagsi
Articles
Conside the following case: The patient is a 44-year-old woman who presents for radiation treatment of an isolated locoregional recurrence of breat cancer in her chest wall, 3 years after undergoing masectomy. At the time of diagnosis, she had T2N2M0 disease, with four of 15 lymph nodes involved with tumor. She received a masectomy with negative margins and appropriate chemotherapy, but none of her physicians talked to her about postmasectomy radiation therapy, which would clearly have been indicated to reduce her risk of locoregional failure and would have been expected to improve her likelihood of survival. She asks the radiation …
Jesting Pilate, Carl E. Schneider
Jesting Pilate, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
I have two goals this month. First, to examine a case that's in the news. Second, to counsel skepticism in reading news accounts of cases. Recently, I was talking with an admirable scholar. He said that transplant surgeons sometimes kill potential donors to obtain their organs efficiently. He added, "This isn't just an urban legend - there's a real case in California." A little research turned up California v. Roozrokh. A little Googling found stories from several reputable news sources. Their headlines indeed intimated that a transplant surgeon had tried to kill a patient to get transplantable organs. CNN.com: …
Drugged, Carl E. Schneider
Drugged, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
The Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Oregon, like its decision last year in Gonzales v. Raich (the "medical marijuana" case), again raises questions about the bioethical consequences of the Controlled Substances Act. When, in 1970, Congress passed that act, it placed problematic drugs in one of five "schedules," and it authorized the U.S. attorney general to add or subtract drugs from the schedules. Drugs in schedule II have both a medical use and a high potential for abuse. Doctors may prescribe such drugs if they "obtain from the Attorney General a registration issued in accordance with the …
Benumbed, Carl E. Schneider
Benumbed, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
I originally intended to write a column on tort liability and research ethics, and I still plan to do so. But this column is a cri de coeur as I finish another semester teaching law and bioethics. This year, I asked with growing frequency, urgency, and exasperation, "Must law's reverence for autonomy squeeze out the impulse to kindness? Where is the beneficence in bioethics?" These questions assail me every term. Why? Consider Steele v. Hamilton County Community Mental Health Board. Mr. Steele was involuntarily "hospitalized after his family reported that he was 'seeing things and trying to fight imaginary …
Experts, Carl E. Schneider
Experts, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
George Bernard Shaw famously said that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Less famously, less elegantly, but at least as accurately, Andrew Abbott argued that professions are conspiracies against each other. Professions compete for authority to do work and for authority over work. The umpire in these skirmishes and sieges is the government, for the state holds the gift of monopoly and the power to regulate it. In Abbott's terms, "bioethics" is contesting medicine's power to influence the way doctors treat patients. If it follows the classic pattern, bioethics will solicit work and authority by recruiting government's power. A …
The Future Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Yale Kamisar
The Future Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Yale Kamisar
Articles
I believe that when the Supreme Court handed down its decisions in 1997 in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacca v. Quill, proponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) suffered a much greater setback than many of them are able or willing to admit.
Making Sausage: The Ninth Circuit's Opinion, Carl E. Schneider
Making Sausage: The Ninth Circuit's Opinion, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
As I write, the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear Compassion in Dying v. Washington and Quill v. Vacco, the two cases in which United States circuit courts of appeals held that a state may not constitutionally prohibit physicians from helping a terminally ill person who wishes to commit suicide to do so. These cases have already received lavish comment and criticism, and no doubt the Supreme Court's opinion will garner even more. Reasonably enough, most of this analysis addresses the merits of physician-assisted suicide as social policy. I, here, want to talk about how setting bioethical policy …
The Reasons So Many People Support Physician-Assisted Suicide - And Why These Reasons Are Not Convincing, Yale Kamisar
The Reasons So Many People Support Physician-Assisted Suicide - And Why These Reasons Are Not Convincing, Yale Kamisar
Articles
It would be hard to deny that there is a great deal of support in this country-and ever-growing support-for legalizing physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Why is this so? I believe there are a considerable number of reasons. In this article, I shall discuss five common reasons and explain why I do not find any of them convincing.
Assisted Suicide And Euthanasia: The Cases Are In The Pipeline, Yale Kamisar
Assisted Suicide And Euthanasia: The Cases Are In The Pipeline, Yale Kamisar
Articles
When I first wrote about this subject 36 years ago, the chance that any state would legalize assisted suicide or active voluntary euthanasia seemed minuscule. The possibility that any court would find these activities protected by the Due Process Clause seemed so remote as to be almost inconceivable. Not anymore. Before this decade ends, at least several states probably will decriminalize assisted suicide and/or active voluntary euthanasia. [Editor's note: In November, Oregon became the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide, allowing doctors to prescribe lethal medication for competent, terminally ill adults who request it.] A distinct possibility also exists that …
Should Active Euthanasia Be Legalized? No: Preserve Traditional Restraints, Yale Kamisar
Should Active Euthanasia Be Legalized? No: Preserve Traditional Restraints, Yale Kamisar
Articles
The distinction between letting people die and killing them by lethal injection is now an integral part of the medico-legal landscape. This is the compromise we have arrived at in the struggle to take a humane approach toward seriously ill patients while still preserving as many traditional restraints against killing as we possibly can. This may be neither the logician's or the philosopher's way to resolve the controversy, but it may nevertheless be a defensible pragmatic way to do so.
Active V. Passive Euthanasia: Why Keep The Distinction?, Yale Kamisar
Active V. Passive Euthanasia: Why Keep The Distinction?, Yale Kamisar
Articles
In the past two decades, we have witnessed a "sea change in public, medical, and legislative judgments" about "letting die" and the "right to die." But it is no less true today than it was 35 years ago, when I first wrote about this subject, that in Anglo-American jurisprudence active euthanasia (what used to be called "mercy killing") is murder.
Bioethics And The Family: The Cautionary View From Family Law, Carl E. Schneider
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 …
Who Should Live-Or Die? Who Should Decide?, Yale Kamisar
Who Should Live-Or Die? Who Should Decide?, Yale Kamisar
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TRIAL asked Professor Kamisar questions on legal and ethical issues surrounding the right to die, a subject attracting increasing interest across the country and around the world.
Synthesizing Related Rules From Statutes And Cases For Legal Expert Systems, Layman E. Allen, Sallyanne Payton, Charles S. Saxon
Synthesizing Related Rules From Statutes And Cases For Legal Expert Systems, Layman E. Allen, Sallyanne Payton, Charles S. Saxon
Articles
Different legal expert systems may be incompatible with each other: A user in characterizing the same situation by answering the questions presented in a consultation can be led to contradictory inferences. Such systems can be ”synthesized’ to help users avoid such contradictions by alerting them that other relevant systems are available to be consulted as they are responding to questions. An example of potentially incompatible, related legal expert systems is presented here - ones for the New Jersey murder statute and the celebrated Quinlan case, along with one way of synthesizing them to avoid such incompatibility.
Some Non-Religious Views Against Proposed 'Mercy-Killing' Legislation Part Ii, Yale Kamisar
Some Non-Religious Views Against Proposed 'Mercy-Killing' Legislation Part Ii, Yale Kamisar
Articles
There have been and there will continue to be compelling circumstances when a doctor or relative or friend will violate The Law On The Books and, more often than not, receive protection from The Law In Action. But this is not to deny that there are other occasions when The Law On The Books operates to stay the hand of all concerned, among them situations where the patient is in fact ( 1 ) presently incurable, ( 2) beyond the aid of any respite which may come along in his life expectancy, suffering ( 3 ) intolerable and ( 4) …
Some Non-Religious Views Against Proposed 'Mercy-Killing' Legislation Part I, Yale Kamisar
Some Non-Religious Views Against Proposed 'Mercy-Killing' Legislation Part I, Yale Kamisar
Articles
In essence, Williams' specific proposal is that death be authorized for a person in the above situation "by giving the medical practitioner a wide discretion and trusting to his good sense." This, I submit, raises too great a risk of abuse and mistake to warrant a change in the existing law. That a proposal entails risk of mistake is hardly a conclusive reason against it. But neither is it irrelevant. Under any euthanasia program the consequences of mistake, of course, are always fatal. As I shall endeavor to show, the incidence of mistake of one kind or another is likely …
Witness--Competency Of An Allopathic Expert In The Field Of Homeopathy--Opinion On Very Fact The Jury Must Determine, Victor H. Lane
Witness--Competency Of An Allopathic Expert In The Field Of Homeopathy--Opinion On Very Fact The Jury Must Determine, Victor H. Lane
Articles
Van Sickle v. Doolittle, (Ia., 1918), 169 N. W. 141, was an action for malpractice against a physician of the homeopathic school of medicine. Upon the trial, a physician of the allopathic school was called, and after testifying that he was unskilled in the science of homeopathy, was allowed to testify that the treatment shown to have been given to the patient by defendant, would produce no physiological effect, and that proper treatment required the giving of such medicines as would produce such effect. This was held error upon the ground that the defendant was called to treat the patient …
Characteristics And Constitutionality Of Medical Legislation, Harry B. Hutchins
Characteristics And Constitutionality Of Medical Legislation, Harry B. Hutchins
Articles
Right to practice medicine regulated by statute.--In the absence of a statute upon the subject, any person is at liberty to practice medicine or surgery or both. This is the common law. And yet in the absence of a statute the physician necessarily assumes certain responsibilities that grow out of his relation to those whom he treats. He is bound to bring to the discharge of his duties the learning, skill and diligence usually possessed and exercised by physicians similarly situated. In other words, while in the absence of statutory regulation, the door of the profession is open to all, …
What Is The Practice Of Medicine?, Harry B. Hutchins
What Is The Practice Of Medicine?, Harry B. Hutchins
Articles
In a popular sense, and as ordinarily understood the practice of medicine is the applying of medical or surgical agencies for the purpose of preventing, relieving, or curing disease, or aiding natural functions, or modifying or removing the results of physical injury. Stewart v. Raab, 55 Minn. 20, 56 N. W. Rep. 256. But in some relations, and for some purposes, the expression has a more extended meaning. This is to be found sometimes in statutory provisions, sometimes in the decisions of the courts upon questions involving the construction of the expression and sometimes in both. Medical acts not infrequently …
Liability Of Hospitals For The Negligence Of Their Physicians And Nurses, Harry B. Hutchins
Liability Of Hospitals For The Negligence Of Their Physicians And Nurses, Harry B. Hutchins
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Liability of Hospitals for the Negligence of their Physicians and Nurses.-This question was recently examined by the Supreme Court of Utah in the case of Gitzhoffen v. Sisters of Holy Cross Hospital Association, 88 Pac. Rep. 691 (Jan. 26, 1907), and the opinion filed may well serve as a basis for comment. The hospital association was sued for damages for injuries that plaintiff claimed to have sustained through the negligence of defendant's nurses.
What Is The Practice Of Medicine?, Harry B. Hutchins
What Is The Practice Of Medicine?, Harry B. Hutchins
Articles
This question was quite fully considered in 4 Michigan Law Review, pp. 373-379, and many of the cases bearing upon the subject that had been decided at the time of the writing of the note were therein collected and reviewed. The case of State v. Wilhite, decided by the Supreme Court of Iowa, November 14, 1906, bears upon this subject, and is, perhaps, of sufficient importance to merit a brief reference.
The Compensation Of Medical Witnesses, Harry B. Hutchins
The Compensation Of Medical Witnesses, Harry B. Hutchins
Articles
The power to compel testimony is inherent in every court, for without it justice could constantly be thwarted. Generally all persons may be compelled to give evidence that is relevant to the matter in controversy. If, therefore, a person who has been duly summoned as a witness at a particular trial absents himself therefrom, without just cause, or attending, refuses to give evidence or to answer questions when directed so to do by the court, he is liable to punishment for contempt.1 But there are limitations upon the general rule, some based upon principles of legal policy and some upon …
Surgical Operation On Minor Without Consent Of Parent, Harry B. Hutchins
Surgical Operation On Minor Without Consent Of Parent, Harry B. Hutchins
Articles
The case of Bakker v. Welsh et al., Io8 N. W. Rep. 94, recently decided by the Supreme Court of Michigan, is of interest, as it involves a question of special importance to the surgical practitioner and one upon which there seems to be a great dearth of authority.