Bioethics in Law [Paperback]

This groundbreaking volume is the first to analyze how and to what extent bioethics considerations influence today's judges. Previous books have attended to the law that governs bioethics problems, but this is the first to examine when and how bioethical issues impact judicial reasoning and decision-making. The volume examines the cutting-edge of the relationship of bioethics to law, and explores how law receives, assesses, and uses bioethics.

The idea for Bioethics in Law began more than a decade ago, while I was studying social science and law. I was parti- larly interested in the collaborations that comprised social s- ence in law. Economic and social data in the pioneering Brandeis brief had been used to defend an early 20th-century labor law; surveys of consumer confusion had helped resolve trademark - fringement cases; psychologists predictions of future violence had informed capital sentencing decisions. Additionally, Kenneth Clarks doll studies, cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, had helped change the course of American 1 history. During that time, however, I was most intensely interested in bioethics, a relatively young field whose relationships to law had not been well analyzed. I wondered whether there could or should be a bioethics in law, because bioethics, unlike the social sciences, was not only in its infancy, but also had distinctly normative features, which might not mesh easily with laws own normativity.Introduction: At the Interface of Bioethics and Law p.- 1. How Does Bioethics Help Judicial Reasoning?.- 2. Health Care Ethics Committee (HEC) Determinations p.- 3. Institutional Review Board (IRB) Determinations p.- 4. Bioethics Commission Reports p.- 5. Bioethics Scholarship.- 6. Reliability of Bioethics Testimony: General Acceptance p.- 7. Reliability of Bioethics Testimony: Peer Review p.- 8. Reliability of Bioethics Testimony: Experience p.- Conclusion: Prospects for the Future p.- Index.

lw