Bioethics: Health Care Law and Ethics (American Casebook Series)

Bioethics: Health Care Law and Ethics uses a variety of legal and interdisciplinary materials to engage students in the study of the intersection of bioethics and law. It includes judicial opinions, statues, regulations and policies from health care organizations and professional associations to give students insight into the strategies and methods used by courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and health care organizations to address issues in bioethics. The book draws from interdisciplinary research to provide critiques of legal and policy issues. Materials in this text are tightly edited and designed to create high quality and focused classroom discussion and includes classroom-tested problems that engage students with the material.

This text begins with an introductory chapter that presents a practical method for ethical analysis of specific cases. That chapter also provides an accessible introduction to the most influential theories of ethics in bioethics, including foundational theories, principlism, natural law, and critical race, feminist, and disability theories. The chapter includes of the relationship between law and ethics, including in matters of conscience. The chapter on Reproduction and Birth includes material on the most recent controversies over access to contraception and abortion as well as coverage of assisted reproductive technologies and maternal-fetal decision making. The chapter on Regulation of Research Involving Human Subjects treats both the federal regulation of research through the Common Rule (including the 2017 final rule and its status in 2018) and the impact of state law (primarily through private litigation over the rights of individuals participating in research). This chapter includes coverage of biobanks, public health research, research with children and other issues. Health care access has increasingly been viewed as matter for bioethics and health care ethics, and a chapter in this text covers legal and policy issues in Discrimination and Unequal Treatment in Health Care. This text includes several chapters on health care decision making in the context of life and death decisions. The material on Organ Transplantation and Determination of Death includes the basic framework for organ transplantation as well as new protocols for retrieval of organs after withdrawal of medical treatment. It also includes cases and notes on controversies on the viability of the brain death standard. Two chapters treat what has been known as “end of life” decision making, including the legal and ethical norms for withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and the legal and ethical status of medically assisted dying. Finally, the book closes with a chapter on Population Health and Public Health, analyzing the interaction between individual rights and community claims.