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Concluding Thoughts: Bioethics In The Language Of The Law, Carl E. Schneider

Book Chapters

What happens when the language of the law becomes a vulgar tongue? What happens, more particularly, when parties to bioethical disputes are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies, the ideas, and even the language, peculiar to judicial proceedings? How suited are the habits and tastes and thus the language of the judicial magistrate to the political, and more particularly, the bioethical, questions of our time? We must ask these questions because, as the incomparable Tocqueville foresaw, it has become American practice to resolve political—and moral—questions into judicial questions. We now reverently refer to the Supreme Court as the great …