Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Commons^™

Texas Advance Directives Act: Nearly A Model Dispute Resolution Mechanism For Intractable Medical Futility Conflicts, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, clinicians and commentators have been calling for the establishment of special adjudicatory dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve intractable medical futility disputes. As a leading model to follow, policymakers both around the United States and around the world have been looking to the conflict resolution provisions in the 1999 Texas Advance Directives Act (‘TADA’). In this article, I provide a complete and thorough review of the purpose, history, and operation of TADA. I conclude that TADA is a commendable attempt to balance the competing goals of efficiency and fairness in the resolution of these time-sensitive life-and-death conflicts. But TADA is …

Medical Malpractice Arbitration: Not Business As Usual, David Larson, David Dahl

Faculty Scholarship

There is an interesting exception to businesses’, employers’, and service providers’ seemingly universal embrace of arbitration processes, particularly mandatory pre-dispute arbitration. Although it may be difficult to believe given arbitration’s current popularity, not everyone requires his or her clients to sign mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements. In fact, some service providers prefer to avoid arbitration regardless of whether it is arranged pre- or post-dispute. So which merchants or service providers are choosing to forgo arbitration and, more importantly, why do they dislike arbitration? And do politics have anything to with their choices? Physicians are not, shall we say, the world’s greatest …

Dispute Resolution Mechanisms For Intractable Medical Futility Disputes, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Medical futility disputes occur frequently in healthcare facilities across the United States. In this Article, I provide an overview of dispute resolution mechanisms through which healthcare providers can resolve these disputes. In Section I, identify three distinctive features of medical futility disputes. First, they usually concern life-sustaining medical treatment for patients in a hospital’s intensive care unit. Second, these patients typically lack decision making capacity. So, a surrogate must make treatment decisions on the patient’s behalf. Third, this surrogate and the patient’s physician disagree over the treatment plan. The surrogate wants to continue life-sustaining treatment. But the physician thinks that …

Mediating Medical Malpractice Lawsuits: The Need For Plaintiff And Physician Participation, Chris Stern Hyman, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

At this moment in history, tort reform and new approaches to resolving medical malpractice claims are part of the national debate about how to improve health care. Federal funding is available for pilot projects to test new approaches to medical malpractice litigation. There is increased pressure from health care regulators to disclose adverse events and communicate better with patients and their families. These all present opportunities to increase the use of mediation, particularly to address medical malpractice lawsuits and to improve patient safety.

For the past seven years, we have been studying ways in which mediation and mediation skills can …

Mediation At The End Of Life: Getting Beyond The Limits Of The Talking Cure, Thaddeus Mason Pope, Ellen A. Waldman

Faculty Scholarship

Mediation has been touted as the magic band-aid to solve end-of-life conflicts. When families and health care providers clash at the end of life, bioethicists and conflict theorists alike have seized upon mediation as the perfect procedural balm. Dissonant values, tragic choices, and roiling grief and loss would be confronted, managed, and soothed during the emotional alchemy of the mediation process. But what is happening in a significant subset of end-of-life disputes is not mediation as we traditionally understand it. Mediation's allure stems from its promise to excavate underlying needs and interests, identify common ground, and push disputants toward more …