If medical malpractice reform affects the supply of physicians, the effects will be concentrated in specialties facing high liability exposure. Many doctors are likely to be indifferent regarding reform, because their likelihood of being sued is low. This difference can be exploited to isolate...

This article demonstrates experimentally that individuals making decisions about their health management are affected by the decision making environment and that law and policy can serve important roles in improving the decision environment. With the support of a generous grant from the Robert...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 tackles many health care-related issues, but medical malpractice liability reform is not one of them. Despite being a perennial target of health care reform -- with accompanying assertions that a medical malpractice liability crisis is...

How Japanese legal and social institutions handle medical errors is little known outside Japan. For almost all of the 20th century, a paternalistic paradigm prevailed. Characteristics of the legal environment affecting Japanese medicine included few attorneys handling medical cases, low...

This Article explains the significance in Japan, hitherto little noticed elsewhere, of criminal law in regulating medical practice. The Article offers reasons of law and social structure for criminal law's role in Japanese medicine, reasons stemming in large part from the weakness of other...

Tort-based doctrines of informed consent have utterly failed to assure that patients understand the risks, benefits, and alternatives to the healthcare they receive. Fifty years of experience with the doctrine of informed consent have shown it to be an abject catastrophe. Most patients lack an...

Recent events such as Hurricane Katrina and the global SARS outbreak underscore the importance of having public health and medical systems that are prepared to increase surge capacity in a variety of emergency scenarios. A core component to increasing surge capacity is the availability of...

The Table of Contents and Preface for this soon-to-be-published casebook can be found here. If you’re more conversant with constitutional law, administrative procedure and/or torts than health policy & ethics (and if teaching MPH students didn’t make your bucket list), then this might be the...

Public health practice - the prevention of disease and injury and the protection of the population - relies on access to information. Legal practice treats information very differently: it is a weapon: has power and value, and it is rarely yielded without getting something in return. Civil...

“Medical futility,” the doctrine by which hospital ethics boards have assumed the right to authorize medical providers to unilaterally withdraw or decline to provide aggressive life sustaining medical care, has swelled in popularity in recent years and has affected the lives of countless...