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Legal standards that allow teens to make health care decisions, or any important decisions, must account for the contingency and variability of minors’ capacity. Traditional law denied minors’ legal authority to make any decisions, giving all power to parents. This rule goes too far; the Supreme Court has held that minors have constitutionally protected autonomy-based rights, and modern views about adolescence are inconsistent with the rule. The question is how and where to draw lines.

Legal standards are based on minors’ evolving maturity, policy favoring decisions that follow medical advice, and policy supporting parental authority. This paper uses four hard cases to show how these considerations factor into legal rules.

“Support a lawyer. go to med school” The above message on the car bumper stickers of members of the medical profession reflects their reaction to the current escalation of malpractice suits filed by attorneys against doctors and hospitals. The impact of these suits against medical personnel and institutions is not limited to patients, doctors and lawyers; the ripple‐effect reaches the entire community, because the rising incidence of malpractice suits tends to increase the cost of malpractice insurance and ultimately the total cost of health care to all members of society. Malpractice is but a small, though highly visible, part of a broader spectrum of interaction between medicine and law. “The complexities of modern society are causing law and medicine to interface with increasing frequency to the extent that contact with the legal process has become an inescapable aspect of the physician's life.” In recognition of this increasing frequency of contacts between medicine and law, a correspondingly increasing number of medicolegal reference works have been published, as exemplified by the selective list which follows this introduction. These should be of direct interest to doctors and members of allied health professions, to attorneys and paralegals and, indirectly, to all who deal with medical personnel and institutions. Traditionally, attorneys, particularly members of the trial bar, have demonstrated a continuing interest in medical literature. For example, the Merck Manual and Goldstein's Medical Trial Technique are familiar to most trial lawyers. They are expected to be well acquainted with anatomy charts, texts on internal medicine, eye, ear, nose and throat, orthopedics, obstetrics, and pediatrics, to name but a few generic medical works of interest to trial lawyers. It should be noted that the lawyer's interest in medical literature is not necessarily motivated by a desire to harass doctors, nurses and hospitals. Attorneys are bound by their Code of Professional Responsibility to represent their clients competently and zealously. In discharging this ethical obligation, the attorney frequently calls upon a physician to testify as an expert witness concerning the cause of a personal injury or death. Consequently, the attorney should be knowledgeable in medical theory and terminology. Furthermore, in pursuit of interdisciplinary competence, a significant number of individuals in the United States have earned both the medical degree and the law degree and appropriate licenses to practice, e.g., Cyril Wecht, M.D., J.D., Director, Pittsburgh Institute of Legal Medicine, Duquesne Law School, member, Faculty of the Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Dentistry, Coroner, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

The purpose of this study is to determine the existing legal implications for medical negligence in India and recommending how open communication and empathy by the doctors can help prevent these implications.

This research is based on a qualitative method. Indian laws, Indian constitution, journal articles, books and other writings have been reviewed to develop this study.

There are many legal implications for medical negligence in India, and justice can be demanded under a number of Indian laws. This study also found that it is important to create awareness regarding the laws governing medical negligence through effective communication and empathy.

Extant literature discusses in detail the various laws related to medical negligence and few talk about creating awareness about these laws amongst people, and while some researchers understand the importance of sensitizing health professionals of the nitty-gritty of the legal implication governing medical negligence, none provides a framework of medical negligence with the help of sensitizing health professionals through communication. This study fills the gap by focusing on prevention than cure.

In healthcare, overuse and underuse of medical treatments represent equally dangerous deviations from an optimal use equilibrium and arouse concerns about possible implications for patients’ health, and for the healthcare system in terms of both costs and access to medical care. Medical liability plays a dominant role among the elements that can affect these deviations. Therefore, a remarkable economic literature studies how medical decisions are influenced by different levels of liability. In particular, identifying the relation between liability and treatments selection, as well as disentangling the effect of liability from other incentives that might be in place, is a task for sound empirical research. Several studies have already tried to tackle this issue, but much more needs to be done. In this chapter, we offer an overview of the state of the art in the study of the relation between liability and treatments selection. First, we reason on the theoretical mechanisms underpinning the relationship under investigation by presenting the main empirical predictions of the related literature. Second, we provide a comprehensive summary of the existing empirical evidence and its main weaknesses. Finally, we conclude by offering guidelines for further research.

Several emergency public health issues have a tremendous impact on and rely upon close coordination with law enforcement officials. Most interactions involve law enforcement personnel providing security, crowd control, and/or traffic control during public health related incidents. However, as varied chemical and biological threats have emerged over the years, this interaction has increased to include joint investigations between the two disciplines. Certain biological threats, such as pandemics, pose direct threats to the law enforcement agency operations. Understanding the role of public health in emergencies, the overlapping missions, and the threats at all levels allows law enforcement professionals to better prepare themselves and their organizations for coordinating operations and maintaining continuity of law enforcement services.

The purpose of this paper is to give a review on the developments leading to the 2017 law on the medical use of cannabis and cannabinoids in Germany, and to present the major advances arising from this law for the supply of patients with cannabis-based drugs and its major limitations.

This paper used an Analysis of the major political statements and documents as well as court decisions of the past 20 years, which can be regarded as the major steps of this development.

Since 1998, when dronabinol/THC was made available in Germany on prescription there have been continuous improvements of the access to cannabis-based medicines. The law of 2017, which made cannabis flowers available to patients on a doctor’s prescription and forced health insurers to pay for a treatment under certain circumstances was a major step. However, many patients, who profit from a treatment with cannabis still do not get access.

The German law on the medical use of cannabis and cannabinoids of 2017 is unique in its kind in the world. Compared to the legal framework in other countries it has several disadvantages, for example with regard to the high prices of cannabis flowers (€20-€25 per gram), and several advantages, for example with regard to the role of health insurers.

To explore the politics of gender, health, medicine, and citizenship in high-income countries, medical sociologists have focused primarily on the practice of legal abortion. In middle- and low-income countries with restrictive abortion laws, however, medical sociologists must examine what happens when women have already experienced spontaneous or induced abortion. Post-abortion care (PAC), a global reproductive health intervention that treats complications of abortion and has been implemented in nearly 50 countries worldwide, offers important theoretical insights into transnational politics of abortion and reproduction in countries with restrictive abortion laws. In this chapter, I draw on my ethnography of Senegal’s PAC program to examine the professional, clinical, and technological politics and practices of obstetric care for abortions that have already occurred. I use the sociological concepts of professional boundary work and boundary objects to demonstrate how Senegalese health professionals have established the political and clinical legitimacy of PAC. I demonstrate the professional precariousness of practicing PAC for physicians, midwives, and nurses. I show how the dual capacity of PAC technologies to terminate pregnancy and treat abortion complications has limited their circulation within the health system, thereby reducing quality of care. Given the contradictory and complex global landscape of twenty-first-century abortion governance, in which pharmaceutical forms of abortion such as Misoprostol are increasingly available in developing countries, and as abortion restrictions are increasingly enforced across the developed world, PAC offers important theoretical opportunities to advance medical sociology research on abortion politics and practices in the global North and South.

Can one describe the ‘natural’ process of pregnancy as ‘harm’, even when negligently brought about? What does that harm consist of? Offering a contextual analysis of the English judiciary's characterisation of wrongful pregnancy, this paper demonstrates from a feminist perspective that the current construction of pregnancy as a ‘personal injury’ is deeply problematic. Forwarding an alternative account, this paper argues for law to embrace a richer notion of autonomy that will better resonate with women's diverse experiences of reproduction, and articulate the importance of autonomy in the reproductive domain: notably, women gaining control over their moral, relational and social lives.