Teaching medical ethics and law

The teaching of medical ethics is not yet characterised by recognised, standard requirements for formal qualifications, training and experience; this is not surprising as the field is still relatively young and maturing. Under the broad issue of the requirements for teaching medical ethics are numerous more specific questions, one of which concerns whether medical ethics can be taught in isolation from considerations of the law, and vice versa. Ethics and law are cognate, though distinguishable, disciplines. In a practical, professional enterprise such as medicine, they cannot and should not be taught as separate subjects. One way of introducing students to the links and tensions between medical ethics and law is to consider the history of law via its natural and positive traditions. This encourages understanding of how medical practice is placed within the contexts of ethics and law in the pluralist societies in which most students will practise. Four examples of topics from medical ethics teaching are described to support this claim. Australasian medical ethics teachers have paid less attention to the role of law in their curricula than their United Kingdom counterparts. Questions like the one addressed here will help inform future deliberations concerning minimal requirements for teaching medical ethics.     

民法与经济法价值之比较分析

本文首先从经济关系层面出发 ,对民法与经济法的互动进行了分析。指出二者价值差异的根源在于经济思想、公平理念和利益观的差异。二者价值体系在总体上具有一致性、谐和性和互补性。同时揭示了他们间的文化与精神的互补、功能的相互矫正及调整对象的交叉。     

The legal ethics of pediatric research

Since the mid- to late 1990s, the scientific and medical research community has sought to increase its access to healthy children for research protocols that involve harm or a risk of harm. This move reverses longstanding policy within that community generally to exclude healthy children from such protocols on the grounds that the research as to them is non-therapeutic, that they are particularly vulnerable to research-related abuses, and that they are unable themselves to give informed consent to their participation. The research community's new posture has been supported by prominent pediatric bioethicists who have argued that unless healthy children are included as research subjects in harmful or risky research, the pediatric population will continue to suffer relative to the adult population in the extent to which it benefits from modern advances in science and medicine. In their view, it is possible for the research community to self-administer a rule that strikes a balance between protecting healthy children from research-related abuses and allowing their inclusion in cutting-edge pediatric research. In this scheme, parental consent is central to the research community's claims about child protection. This Article explores the flaws inherent in this ethics of pediatric research. Specifically, it challenges the view from ethics that the law permits parents to consent to their children's inclusion in harmful or risky research to the extent that related invasions would meet legal maltreatment standards. More broadly, it challenges the movement to increase access to healthy children for harmful and risky research on the ground that it risks two important regressions: First, in its willingness to risk harm to individual children in the interests of the group, it threatens the progress the law has made in its development of the concept of the child as an individual worthy of respect in his or her own right, a concept that imagines parents as fiduciaries and that includes strong protections against invasions of bodily integrity. Second, in its failure to assure that the burdens of non-therapeutic research are not placed disproportionately on children of lower socioeconomic and minority status, it violates the antidiscrimination principle, which has only begun to make good on its promise of equal treatment for all children. Ultimately, this Article argues that harmonization of the rules governing pediatric research with the law of child protection and parents' consent authority is the best way to assure that children are protected in the research setting in these respects and to the same extent they are otherwise in the society.     

医事法学专业教学研究的现状与重大问题

为了培养兼具医学知识和法学知识的复合型医事法学人才，已有40余所院校设置医事法学专业。为了该朝阳专业的完善与发展，众多学者从多方面进行了大量研究，但该专业的教学却存在许多未解难题，毕业生的质量受到极大质疑。本文通过深入分析现有的研究，指出当前研究存在的三个重大问题：从感性出发研究医事法学专业的教育，缺乏数据支撑；在象牙塔内研究教育问题，缺乏与社会的联系；研究局限于学者、教师视角，缺乏毕业生对本专业回顾性的思考与批判。