Competence to give informed consent for medical procedures

This study shows that referrals to psychiatry for evaluation for competence to give informed consent generally were made on patients who refused medical treatment. In this sample of referred patients, the only patients found to be incompetent to give informed consent were those with organic brain syndromes. No one with either schizophrenia or depression was found to be incompetent. It is possible that schizophrenic and depressed patients may generally be competent to give informed consent to medical treatment. This finding might be true notwithstanding the fact that many such patients have been found in other studies to be incompetent to consent to voluntary psychiatric treatment. For example, a patient may have delusions that others can read his mind and thoughts, but he still can understand that he needs dialysis for renal failure. Alternatively, it may be relatively rare that an emergency procedure is necessary before a patient's psychosis can be brought under control and consequently internists and surgeons themselves may prefer to wait. The significance of the results is unclear. Because of active interest in the doctrine of informed consent for psychiatric and medical patients by both physicians and attorneys and the few studies within this population, there is a strong need for more study regarding competence to give informed consent. Further study is especially important for psychotic patients for whom psychiatric consultation is not requested.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Globalization and extraterritorial application of economic regulation: crisis in international law and balancing interests

There are two developments the combination of which has led to new challenges to international law: the growth of economic regulations and globalisation. While the modern economies are associated with the proliferation of regulatory laws which are rooted in the national economic and social policies, the loosening of the national borders and globalisation has led to conflicts of economic regulations. Such developments have posed various risks of violations of national economic regulations by the economic actors and could lead to tension among national states which have jurisdiction over multinational enterprises in one way or another. The private parties involved in such a situation could somehow avoid such risks by their own initiatives and contractual arrangements but in most cases such measures do now work and the conflict has to be resolved through the cooperation between the countries involved. The paper investigates the potentials for public international law to come up with rules, principles and norms to resolve such complex disputes which touch up issues such as non-intervention, equality of sovereign states, state immunity, self-determination and other principles of international law. Unlike certain area of international law such as law of sea where a few factors involved and the disputes could be resolved by relying on simple facts and rules, the application of national economic regulations extraterritorially creates tensions among the nation states in respect of the demarcation of national jurisdictions. It is here that public international faces a new challenges and need to come up with new approaches such a balancing of interests of the states involved in the conflicts.