"Law week soccer competition: 16-19 May 2005." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 25.

The law commonly conceived as a norm : deficiency of this conception -- On some general hints of this deficiency, and in particular those evinced by the likely origin of the current definitions of law -- The need to distinguish the distinct legal norms from the legal order considered as a whole. The logical impossibility of defining the legal order as a set of norms -- How the unity of a legal order has been sometimes intuited (...) -- How a legal order is not only a set of norms, as it also encompasses other elements -- How such ements are implicitly postulated by the common inquiry into the distinguishing characteristics of law -- Assessment, from this point of view, of the so-called objectivity of law -- The element of sanction -- The expression "the legal order" -- The essential elements of the concept of law. The law as an institution and the law as a precept -- The preceding doctrine on the concept of institution -- My concept of institution and its fundamental characteristics : 1. The objective existence of the institution; 2. Institution and social body; 3. The institution's selfness; 4. The unity of the institution -- Equivalence of the concept of institution and the concept of a legal order -- Evidence for this equivalence based on the doctrine that the law is only "form" -- Mention of some problems that need solving in the light of this equivalence -- Cases in which the original establishment of a law does not depend on norms, but on the emergence of an institution, and the impossibility of reducing the institution to the norms -- The concept of institution and the international legal order -- The institution and the legal relationship: relationships between more persons -- Relationships between persons and things : examples of some of these relationships that, considered more broadly, cab be portrayed as institutions -- The institution and the legal person -- My conception of the law with respect to certain problems relating to : 1. The legal character of state power; 2. The extension of the state personality; 3. The legal relevance of its territory and citizenry -- Critical assessment of some opinions that attach importance to the legal order only insofar as it reflect relationships between persons. Applications to: 1. The legal sanction; 2. The state territory and citizenship; 3. The state bodies; 4. The limits of the legislative function -- Some consequences of my conception with regard to the subjective aspect of the law: the legal relationship; the status of persons; rights in rem; the correlation between rights and obligations; the equal position of subjects -- Recapitulatory remarks -- The plurality of legal orders and the doctrine that reduces all law to state law -- The untenability of this doctrine from a historical and theoretical point of view -- Its untenability with respect to the existing law -- Non-state legal orders; international law -- Ecclesiastical law -- The order of entities that are considered unlawful or are ignored by the state -- Entities that are regulated by the state, but also have an order of their own which is not recognized by the state (private disciplinary orders; the internal organisation of workplaces; so-called unrecognized associations or institutions, etc.) -- Doctrines that confine the concept of a legal order to the order of communities in general and specifically to necessary communities -- The relations between different legal orders. Principles that have to be taken into account with respect to : 1. Original or derivative institutions; 2. The particular or general ends of institutions; 3. Their diverse basis; 4. Simple or complex institutions; 5. Perfect or imperfect; 6. With or without personality; 7. Independent, coordinated or subordinated -- The concept of relevance of one order to another -- The title for this relevance: a. The relation of superiority and correlative dependence between two orders; b. The relation whereby an order presupposes another; c. The relation whereby reciprocally independent orders depend a further one; d. The relevance unilaterally attributed by an order to another on which it depends; e. The relation of succession between orders -- Diverse aspects (existence, content, effectiveness) expressing the relevance an order to another one. Cases in which the existence of an order depends on another: a. Complete subordination of the former to the latter which directly establishes the former or assigns limited autonomy to it. Independence, as far as its existence is concerned, of an order in case of a less expansive subordination (some spheres of the order of the states of a federal state vis-à-vis the latter; the order of states vis-à-vis international law) and general principles; b. In the hypothesis of an order that represents the presupposition of another (state law vis-à-vis international law) -- The relevance of an order to another with respect to its content. Various cases: a. The superior order as the mediated or unmediated source of an inferior order; the superior order (international law, ecclesiastical concordats) which is not the source, and yet affects the content of inferior orders; b. the Superior order about effects the content of more orders subjected to, which however are independent from each other; c. the order of that itself that determines its own content by considering a subjected or independent order : private international law; ecclesiastical law as it refers to civil laws; the law of the state that refers to ecclesiastical law; d. an order that incorporates another -- The relevance of an order to one another with respect to its effects: external and internal effectiveness of an order. Various cases of external effectiveness: a. The relationships between orders where the one partially or totally depends on the other; b. Relationships between more orders that are independent from each other because of a unilateral disposition of one or each of them. Private international law; civil effectiveness of ecclesiastical law; c. Relationships meeting more orders in which one is of the presupposition of the other; d. Relationships between orders that succeed each other -- Diverse extension of the relevance of an order to another. Applications with regard to the problem of so-called natural obligations -- The irrelevance of an order to another; total or partial, reciprocal or unilateral -- A legal order that as such is irrelevant to another, but it is relevant in other respects (orders that are considered unlawful by the state; corporations, de facto institutions) -- Total developments of an order to another: possibility of such an irrelevance also with respect to the order of the state -- Critical assessment of the opposite doctrine. The limitations of the state order; various figures and consequences; examples of matters that are legally indifferent to the state (private disciplinary orders; particular religious orders; the orders of some non-patrimonial associations; etc.) -- The internal orders of the institutions, especially state ones, vis-à-vis the order of other institutions in which they are included. (shrink)

The context in which the British Medical Association first considered publishing specific guidelines on decisions about attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation , in the early 1990s, needs to be remembered. At that time the subject was often seen as far too sensitive to be mentioned to patients. Many hospitals had no formal policy about how CPR decisions should be made, apart from an expectation that these were purely medical matters. Advance decision making about CPR, where it existed, appears to have been generally (...) on an ad hoc basis by doctors. Patients, their relatives and the rest of the health care team were often unaware of it. After several cases in which nurses had been disciplined–unfairly in the eyes of some–for complying with their patients' known wishes about non-resuscitation in cases where no advance medical decision had been recorded, there was a demand for guidance.The BMA was approached by nurses' representatives with a view to publishing some very basic advice. This advice, issued in 1993 jointly with the Royal College of Nursing, and in association with the Resuscitation Council, was under 1000 words. Whether this brevity reflects difficulties in achieving consensus or lower expectations about what was required is a matter for speculation. Throughout the 1990s the guidance was distributed widely and used as a basis for many hospitals' local policies. Recently, however, the demands on the BMA and other professional bodies for ethical advice have changed and grown. Discussion of sensitive decisions about potentially life-prolonging interventions is now …. (shrink)

Artificial social intelligence (ASI) agents have great potential to aid the success of individuals, human–human teams, and human–artificial intelligence teams. To develop helpful ASI agents, we created an urban search and rescue task environment in Minecraft to evaluate ASI agents’ ability to infer participants’ knowledge training conditions and predict participants’ next victim type to be rescued. We evaluated ASI agents’ capabilities in three ways: (a) comparison to ground truth—the actual knowledge training condition and participant actions; (b) comparison among different ASI (...) agents; and (c) comparison to a human observer criterion, whose accuracy served as a reference point. The human observers and the ASI agents used video data and timestamped event messages from the testbed, respectively, to make inferences about the same participants and topic (knowledge training condition) and the same instances of participant actions (rescue of victims). Overall, ASI agents performed better than human observers in inferring knowledge training conditions and predicting actions. Refining the human criterion can guide the design and evaluation of ASI agents for complex task environments and team composition. (shrink)

This article presents the importance of and concomitant ethical and legal concerns regarding the implementation of team-based work system designs in American corporations. It concludes by reconciling some of the important issues and providing direction for future action.

As reproductive freedoms in the U.S. undergo significant rollbacks, vital reproductive health services — and the care teams delivering them — face escalating legal threats and complexity. This qualitative case-control community-based participatory research study describes how legal problem-solving supports for reproductive care teams serving mothers with opioid use disorder are protective for both patients and care team members. We describe how medical legal partnerships (MLPs) can promote Reproductive Justice and argue for wider adoption of care-team (...) facing legal supports. (shrink)

Clinical ethics support, including ethics consultation, has become established in the field of medical practice throughout the world. This practice has been regarded as useful, most notably in the UK and the USA, in solving ethical problems encountered by both medical practitioners and those who receive medical treatment. In Japan, however, few services are available to respond to everyday clinical ethical issues, although a variety of difficult ethical problems arise daily in the medical field: termination of life support, euthanasia and (...) questions about patient autonomy. In light of these conditions, a group of 17 volunteer educators and researchers from the area of biomedical ethics, including the authors, have formed the Clinical Ethics Support and Education Project, and began providing Japan’s first small team clinical ethics consultation service in October, 2006. Members include scholars of biomedical ethics, scholars of philosophy and ethics, legal professionals and legal scholars, nurses and doctors, consisting of five women and 12 men. Consultation teams, made up of a small number of members, were organised each time a request for consultation was received. Over approximately 15 months (October 2006–December 2007), the programme received 22 consultation requests from medical practitioners and medical institutions, and three from the families of patients. In this paper, we will discuss the status of our consultation service and examples of consultation cases we have handled. In addition, we will examine the process of evaluating small team clinical ethics consultation services, as well as the strengths and weakness of such programmes. (shrink)

Contents -- Introduction -- Team -- Introduction -- Scout -- Select -- Prepare -- Advance -- Organization -- Introduction -- Human resources -- Financial affairs -- Legal affairs -- Patent affairs -- Society -- Introduction -- Open science -- Citizen science -- Media -- Web profile -- Epilogue -- Further reading -- Acknowledgements.

This study examines the influence of three components of corporate social responsibility on team performance. In the proposed model of this study, team performance is indirectly affected by three dimensions of perceived corporate citizenship (i.e., economic, legal, and ethical citizenship) via the mediation of team efficacy and team self-esteem. Surveying members of 172 teams confirms most of our hypothesized effects. Our results show that economic citizenship influences team performance via the mediation of both (...) class='Hi'>team efficacy and team self-esteem. However, legal citizenship influences team performance via team efficacy alone, whereas ethical citizenship influences team performance only via team self-esteem. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical model of judicial reasoning that satisfactorily integrates the partial explanations offered by three differ- ent theoretical research paradigms: Philosophy of Law, Legal Epistemology, and Artificial Intelligence and Law.The model emerges from the application of knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation methods. The model employs the theory of neural networks as a theoretical metaphor in order to generate its explanations and its visual representations.The epistemological status of the model is of a (...) constructivist stripe. It is in line with contemporary research tendencies within cognitive psychology that propose that judicial reasoning may be better understood if we assume a coherentist and a connectionist approach.Resumen:El objetivo de este ensayo es presentar un modelo teórico del razona- miento judicial que pueda integrar de manera satisfactoria las explicaciones parciales ofrecidas en tres distintos paradigmas de investigación teórica: la filosofía del derecho, la epistemología jurídica y la inteligencia artificial aplicada al derecho.Este modelo surge de la aplicación de algunos métodos de elicitación y representación del conocimiento. Y emplea la teoría de las redes neurales como una metáfora teórica a fin de generar sus propias explicaciones y representaciones visuales.El estatus epistemológico del modelo es de corte constructivista, y se encuentra en la línea de las tendencias de investigación contemporánea dentro de la psicología cognitiva, la cual plantea que el razonamiento judicial puede ser entendido de mejor manera si asumimos un enfoque coherentista y conexionista. (shrink)

First published in 1917 and 1918, with a second edition in 1946, this is the first English translation of Santi Romano's classic work, L'ordinamento giuridico. The main focus of The Legal Order is the notion of institution, which Romano considers to be both the core and distinguishing feature of law. After criticising accounts of the nature of law centred on notions of rule, coercion or authority, he offers a compelling conception, not merely of law as an institution, (...) but of the institution as 'the first, original and essential manifestation of law'. Romano advances a definition of a legal institution as any group who share rules within a bounded context: for example, a family, a firm, a factory, a prison, an association, a church, an illegal organisation, a state, the community of states, and so on. Therefore, this understanding of legal institutionalism at the same time provides a ground-breaking theory of legal pluralism whereby 'there are as many legal orders as institutions'. The acme of a jurisprudential current long overlooked in the Anglophone environment, The Legal Order not only proposes what Carl Schmitt described as a 'very significant theory', but, more importantly, it offers precious insights for a thorough rethinking of the relationship between law and society in today's world. (shrink)

Background There are legal protections for nurse researchers at public universities who employ community-based participatory research (CBPR) in research about social or health inequities. Dissemination of CBPR research data by researchers or participants may divulge unjust laws and create an imperative for university involvement. Research Question What are United States-based legal dissemination protections for CBPR health equity nurse researchers? Research Design Three case examples employing CBPR are examined: 1) a mixed methods study with participants reporting illegal discrimination in (...) a municipal initiative about capacity building in community-based organizations serving children; 2) a visual methods study exposing potential clean air law violations in environmental justice research; and 3) a study examining workload violations and illegal discrimination among hotel workers. Participants and Research Context The cases involved participants from protected social class backgrounds. The research is described with respect to: background, funding, research purpose, and research team; research participants’ power and legal vulnerability; dissemination of relevant research information balancing vulnerability and power; research dissemination issues; potential legal issues involved; and laws researchers may use. Ethical Considerations IRB approval was obtained for the studies. Using a social justice ethical framework, studies highlight actual or potential legal aspects of data dissemination in the context of gathering data about injustice. Findings Legal protections for research data dissemination, whistleblower protection, research advancement protection, anti-harassment protection, false claims, defamation, and visual data liabilities are described. Conclusion Knowledge of legal research data dissemination protections is an essential competency for nurse researchers invested in uplifting social justice. (shrink)

The bumpy road to institutionalism : Schmitt's way-out of decisionism -- Exploring Schmitt's institutionalism : institutions and normality -- Institutionalist decisionism : law as the shelter of society -- Institution and identity : reassessing Schmitt's political theory -- Schmitt vs. Kelsen : the social ontology of legal life -- Schmitt vs. Hauriou : the politicization of institutionalism -- Schmitt vs. Romano : institutionalism without pluralism? -- Schmitt vs. Mortati : the concretization of the concrete order -- The impossibility (...) of legal indeterminacy -- The inconceivability of legal pluralism. (shrink)

Três autores medievais são aquiexaminados a respeito da questão da normalidadee da exceção em teoria politica. Tomás de Aquinoescreveu sua obra voltada apenas para os casosde normalidade institucional. Egídio Romanopergunta-se sobre a caducidade da ordem institucionalo surgimento do poder politico originário noestado de exceção. Guilherme de Ockham trata dacaducidade da ordem legal e do retomo à ordemdo direito natural.

Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on the Pentagon in the United States, concerns over security issues have been at an all-time high in this country. Both state and federal governments continue to discuss legislation on these issues amid much controversy. One key concern of both employers and employees is the extent that employers, espousing a "need to know" mentality, continue to expand their capability and implementation of surveillance of employees in the workplace. With (...) the technology typically growing faster than the speed of legislation, protective or permissive, the management and legal issues involved in electronic monitoring of employee communications in the workplace, are and well should be on the agenda for discussion of every management and legal team in American business today. Companies have a legitimate right to protect their trade secrets from disclosure by disgruntled employees. Similarly, companies also have a duty to protect their good names and reputations from unauthorized employee communications with outside parties, and even other employees, that may damage them. It is also a prime duty of management to ensure, in their direction of their workforces, that the employees execute their responsibilities by working full time on their stated objectives. In this regard, any management that fails to oversee its workforce to ensure that employees are not expending valuable company time, for which they are being compensated, on personal business, including unauthorized communications, is remiss in its responsibilities to its shareholders. The company may see a reduction of the price of its shares in the marketplace if it does not protect the economic interests of its shareholders. (shrink)

This article puts forward a theory of corporate criminal responsibility as the shared responsibility of the members of a team for wrongdoing committed by one of their number in the pursuit of their common goals. The theory of team member responsibility advanced in this article differs from theories—such as those of Peter French and Phillip Pettit—under which corporate or group responsibility is viewed as the responsibility of the corporation or group as an autonomous moral person. Instead, this article (...) defends a conception of a collectivity as a kind of relationship among individuals; under this conception, a collectivity is something more than the sum of its members, but not something having an autonomous existence apart from its members. To develop this idea, the article employs the concept of a team. Where individuals participate in a team, doing their part towards a collective goal, they are entitled to share in the credit for the positive achievements resulting from their combined actions, and they also share in the discredit for negative achievements of the group. This is so for each member, regardless of whether the member's individual contribution was a but-for cause of the group's achievement. Further, in the specific case of corporate teams, team member responsibility can help to explain why there should be liability of the corporate entity for crimes committed by members of the corporation (a group which typically includes its employees, officers, directors and, in some circumstances, its shareholders) in the pursuit of the corporation's goals. (shrink)

This book offers a comparative study of the management of legal pluralism. The authors describe and analyse the way state and non-state legal systems acknowledge legal pluralism - defined as the coexistence of a state and non-state legal systems in the same space in respect of the same subject matter for the same population - and determine its consequences for their own purposes. The book sheds light on the management processes deployed by legal systems in (...) Africa, Canada, Central Europe and the South Pacific, the multitudinous factors circumscribing the action of systems and individuals with respect to legal pluralism, and the effects of management strategies and processes on systems as well as on individuals. The book offers fresh practical and analytical insight on applied legal pluralism, a fast-growing field of scholarship and professional practice. Drawing from a wealth of original empirical data collected in several countries by a multilingual and multidisciplinary team, it provides a thorough account of the intricate patterns of state and non-state practices with respect to legal pluralism. As the book's non-prescriptive approach helps to uncover and evaluate several biases or assumptions on the part of policy makers, scholars and development agencies regarding the nature and the consequences of legal pluralism, it will appeal to a wide range of scholars and practitioners in law, development studies, political science and social sciences. (shrink)

Although COVID-19 vaccines are free and readily available in the United States, many healthcare workers remain unvaccinated, potentially exposing their patients to a life-threatening pathogen. This paper reviews the ethical and legal factors surrounding patient requests to limit their care teams exclusively to vaccinated providers. Key factors that shape policy in this area include patient autonomy, the rights of healthcare workers, and the duties of healthcare institutions. Hospitals must also balance the rights of interested parties in the context of (...) logistical constraints, equity, and public health considerations. (shrink)

This issue’s “Legal Briefing” column covers recent legal developments involving medical decision making for incapacitated patients who have no available legally authorized surrogate decision maker. These individuals are frequently referred to either as “adult orphans” or as “unbefriended,” “isolated,” or “unrepresented” patients. The challenges involved in obtaining consent for medical treatment on behalf of these individuals have been the subject of major policy reports. Indeed, caring for the unbefriended has even been described as the “single greatest category of (...) problems” encountered in bioethics consultation. In 2012, JCE published a comprehensive review of the available mechanisms by which to make medical decisions for the unbefriended. The purpose of this “Legal Briefing” is to update the 2012 study. Accordingly, this “Legal Briefing” collects and describes significant legal developments from only the past three years. My basic assessment has not changed. “Existing mechanisms to address the issue of decision making for the unbefriended are scant and not uniform.” Most facilities are “muddling through on an ad hoc basis.” But the situation is not wholly negative. There have been a number of promising new initiatives. I group these developments into the following seven categories: 1. Increased Attention and Discussion 2. Prevention through Better Advance Care Planning 3. Prevention through Expanded Default Surrogate Lists 4. Statutorily Authorized Intramural Mechanisms 5. California Litigation Challenging the Team Approach 6. Public Guardianship 7. Improving Existing Guardianship Processes. (shrink)

Different methods have been developed to address ethical issues during research. Most of these methods were developed at universities. In this article ethical parallel research within a Research and Technology Organization is described. Within a European project about perceived security, CPSI, the ethical issues were identified by ethicists cooperating in the project. The project CPSI was aimed at developing a research method that can be used by (local) government to monitor or assess perceived and actual security. Together with the researchers (...) a way was sought to address the ethical issues. Several issues could be addressed by choices with regard to the design of the validation study, in this case a survey. The ethical and legal reasons that were relevant for choices in the design of the validation study were made an integral part of these decisions. Some issues were already identified during the writing of the proposal others were only identified during the research. Participating in the research gave the ethicists access to all relevant information. It made it possible to address the ethical issues when they became relevant. Ethical reasons were part of some of the discussions on research method. It proved possible to address most ethical issues satisfactorily during the research project. (shrink)

The central claim of this paper is that American states’ use of so-called “triggering conditions” to regulate surrogate decision-making authority in end-of-life care leaves unresolved a number of important ethical and legal considerations regarding the scope of that authority. The paper frames the issue with a case set in a jurisdiction in which surrogate authority to withdraw life-sustaining treatment is triggered by two specific clinical conditions. The case presents a quandary insofar as the clinical facts do not satisfy the (...) triggering conditions, and yet both the appropriate surrogates and the care team agree that withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment is in the best interest of the patient. The paper surveys applicable law across the 50 states and weighs the arguments for and against the inclusion of such triggering conditions in relevant legal regimes. The paper concludes by assessing the various legal and policy options states have for regulating surrogate decision-making authority in light of the moral considerations, and notes the possibility for conflict within ethics teams arising from the potential tension between prudence, risk-aversion, and moral obligation. (shrink)

Caring for unrepresented patients encompasses legal, ethical, and moral challenges regarding decision-making, consent, the patient’s values, wishes, best interest, and the healthcare team’s professional integrity and autonomy. In this article, I consider the impact of the aging population and the effects of the social determinants of health and suggest that without preventive intervention, the number of unrepresented patients will continue to increase. The health, social, and legal risk factors for becoming unrepresented require a multidisciplinary response. Medical-Legal (...) Partnerships (MLPs) bring healthcare and legal professionals together to address risk factors and health-harming legal needs. The article discusses the role of MLPs in identifying at-risk individuals, providing preventive interventions, and providing support. I make recommendations and conclude that proactive MLPs offer a sustainable approach to the ethical challenges in caring for unrepresented patients by providing interventions to prevent individuals from becoming unrepresented. (shrink)

El presente trabajo busca acercarse al problema del exilio como categoría jurídico-política. Con esta finalidad, se hace un recorrido sobre la noción misma de exilio en tanto pena desde sus orígenes en el derecho romano arcaico. Interesa de modo particular ver el lugar que esta institución punitiva ha tenido en la política latinoamericana, tanto en el momento de su constitución política bajo la forma de Estado-nación, como en las últimas dictaduras militares de la región. En vistas a desarrollar un (...) análisis filosófico situado, se revisará el modo en que se instituyó jurídicamente el exilio durante los últimos periodos dictatoriales, especialmente en el caso de Argentina y Chile. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Legal CommentaryGreg Vijayendran, PartnerThe issues arising for consideration in this case are:a). the nature of the investigator-subject relationship that gives rise to an ethical duty to disclose incidental findings;b). whether the research team in this case (including the principal investigator and co-investigator) has a duty to disclose the incidental finding observed to the research volunteer; andc). whether the research team has a further ethical duty to (...) ensure that the MRI scans are clinically evaluated to identify potential health problems.The starting point is to define “incidental findings” for clarity and precision. A good working definition of the same is “a finding concerning an individual research participant that has potential health or reproductive importance and that is discovered in the course of conducting research but is beyond the aims of the study”.1With regard to incidental findings, Miller, Mello and Joffe in an insightful article2 observe:… there is little ethical guidance available to steer such efforts, and practices appear to vary widely. Although several articles have catalogued the ethical dilemmas surrounding incidental findings, with the exception of seminal work by Henry Richardson and Leah Belsky on the more general topic of researchers’ obligations to provide ancillary clinical care to research subjects, systematic ethical analysis of the incidental findings problem is lacking.In this case scenario, there is no concurrent, overlapping physician-patient relationship (even if the research subjects were recruited from patients at the hospital’s memory clinic) that might provide an alternative [End Page 274] source of obligations relating to incidental findings. No representations have been made by the research team to the patient-volunteers. The patient-volunteers did not opt to be kept in the know as to incidental findings. Neither did they express a preference not to be informed of such findings. Had they done so, such a choice would presumably absolve the research team from keeping the patient-volunteers informed. From an autonomy perspective, there is no compelling reason why such a choice by a patient-volunteer should not be honoured.One view of the first issue outlined above is that the relationship between a research investigator and a research subject is founded in contract. On that premise, investigators have no default obligations, only what is expressed or implied in the terms of the “contracts” for recruiting volunteers. The relevant documents and data to be analysed would be the “contracts” executed by the parties and the informed consent form as well as interactions and iterations between investigators and patient-volunteers. Of particular significance would be representations made by the investigators that could form part of the terms of the contract. Apart from express terms, there would also be some rare implied terms — for example, an implied term of good faith although this has only been recognised in certain sui generis categories of contracts (for example, insurance contracts). Adopting this perspective strips away any fiduciary or professional aspects of the relationship and reduces the relationship to nothing more than a contractual one. Such a view relies on the legal relationship as a springboard for the ethical duties although this perspective would be reductive because very few implied duties are presumed. Unless incidental findings fall within the terms of the contract, investigators are under no obligation to respond to them. In the final analysis, the main objection to this contractual perspective is that it conflates legal duties with ethical duties when these two distinct types of obligations which investigators and a research team have to elucidate.An alternative approach involves a focus on professional relationships. Concepts of incidental findings and ancillary care presume some sort of professional relationship pursuant to which the findings are analysed as incidental or the care is determined as ancillary. “Professionals” refer to persons who are usually distinguished by their specialised knowledge and training as well as by their commitment to provide important services to patients, clients or consumers.3 Professional relationships are often, but not always, characterised by a service role, sometimes involving a fiduciary relationship.Although researchers cannot be viewed as having a service role vis-à-vis individual subjects, it is reasonable [End Page 275] to regard research as a professional activity. Researchers possess... (shrink)

Fiester and Yuan (2023) address an important, hitherto underdiscussed issue: ethical hazards of behavior contracts linked to patients’ and families’ demeanor in interacting with the healthcare team...

This paper reviews the accountability regimes of contractarian and communitarian theory. The contractarian theory is further elaborated with the developments of shareholder primacy, the stakeholder theory and team production model , and the communitarian themes of single constituency, Catholic social thought and corporate citizenship. Contractarian theory is rooted in liberalism, where as communitarian theory is a humanist discipline. While contractarians stress the value of competition, liberty and freedom, the communitarians emphasize cooperation, justice and civic responsibility. The purpose of this (...) analysis is to frame corporate ‘personhood’ in the perspective of the existing theories. This article suggests that corporate citizenship has been revived under Canadian law which contemplates a communitarian corporation. (shrink)

In an increasingly interconnected global community, severe disasters or disease outbreaks in one country or region may rapidly impact global health security. As seen during the responses to the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, local response capacities can be rapidly overwhelmed and international assistance may be necessary to support the affected region to respond and recover and to protect other countries from the spread of disease. For example, (...) President Obama stated on September 16, 2014, that “if the [Ebola] outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected, with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us…. [T]his…is not just a threat to regional security — it’s a potential threat to global security if these countries break down…. And that’s why…I directed my team to make this a national security priority.”. (shrink)

Background In April 2019, our hospital transitioned to an electronic patient record system and patient portal (MyGOSH). MyGOSH enables young people aged 12 years or older and their parents to access results, documentation, appointments, and to communicate with their care team. Aims A focus group was conducted to explore the ethical and legal considerations of young people and their parents using a patient portal from the perspective of hospital Ethics Committee members. Participants and research context Members of the (...) hospital Paediatric Bioethics Centre were recruited ( n = 7). Written informed consent was provided by all participants. Research design The focus group discussion was recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. Ethical considerations Health Research Authority Research Ethics Committee (REC) Approval was granted by London Southeast REC (IRAS Project ID: 248793; REC Reference: 18/LO/1945). Results Four themes, and sub-themes, were identified: (1) granting access – complexities of assessing competence/capacity, exclusion from MyGOSH due to non-disclosure of diagnosis, and truth-telling; (2) inequalities resulting in inequities – complexities of inequity in access; (3) responding to change – providing support and managing expectations; (4) engagement, empowerment and understanding – data safety, empowering young people to take ownership of their health data, a one-size fits all system may not meet the needs of all families, and early engagement with young people/parents. Discussion Giving families portal access can increase engagement, empowering them to be more involved in care, yet poses challenges for all. Complexities exist in the assessment for portal access, and supporting and managing user expectations whilst providing an equitable service. Conclusions Ongoing support is required for all stakeholders following patient portal implementation to navigate the ethical and legal complexities, and to promote equity and portal utility for patient benefit. (shrink)

Medical-legal partnerships — collaborative endeavors between health care clinicians and lawyers to more effectively address issues impacting health care — have proliferated over the past decade. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to improve the health outcomes and quality of life of patients and families, recognizing the many non-medical influences on health care and thus the value of an interdisciplinary team to enhance health. There are currently over 180 MLPs at over 200 hospitals and health centers in (...) the United States, with increasing federal interest and potential legislative support of this model.This article examines the unique, interrelated, and often similar ethical issues that confront the clinical and legal partners involved in MLPs. We contend that the ethical precepts of the clinical and legal professions should be seen as opportunities, not barriers, to further the interdisciplinary nature of MLPs. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the legal case involving the Court of Arbitration of Sport, the Union of European Football Associations, and the Turkish team Eskişehirspor to analyze the leg...

Technology has substantially transformed the way legal services operate in many different countries. With a large and complex collection of digitized legal documents, the judiciary system worldwide presents a promising scenario for the development of intelligent tools. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of organizing and summarizing the constantly growing collection of legal documents, uncovering hidden topics, or themes that later can support tasks such as legal case retrieval and legal judgment prediction. Our (...) approach to this problem relies on topic discovery techniques combined with a variety of preprocessing techniques and learning-based vector representations of words, such as Doc2Vec and BERT-like models. The proposed method was validated using four different datasets composed of short and long legal documents in Brazilian Portuguese, from legal decisions to chapters in legal books. Analysis conducted by a team of legal specialists revealed the effectiveness of the proposed approach to uncover unique and relevant topics from large collections of legal documents, serving many purposes, such as giving support to legal case retrieval tools and also providing the team of legal specialists with a tool that can accelerate their work of labeling/tagging legal documents. (shrink)

International research collaborations engage multiple countries, researchers, and universities. This enhances the magnitude of contextual challenges, including legal and ethical dimensions across various jurisdictions, that must be bridged in qualitative research regardless of discipline, also in the construction of informed consents. From a Scandinavian perspective, this discussion paper explores challenges pertaining to the construction of informed consents related to EU data protection legislation, to which research institutions are subject when processing data related to EU residents. Next, it discusses challenges (...) related to different traditions in terms of handling informed consent and research participants’ integrity, including the possibilities to waive anonymity in research. In international, multidisciplinary studies where researchers also operate in relatively ‘unknown territory’, it is especially important to be aware of and reflect on (inter)national possibilities and limitations related to laws, ethics, and culture/traditions in societies and within the academic fields. The variations in laws, ethical guidelines, and traditions in different countries demand that researchers are up to date with laws and ethical guidelines in the studied countries. Their practical implementation in the countries at stake in international, collaborative research endeavours are important, especially since such regulations and guidelines are far from static and change over time. The implementation of good ethical research practice requires democratic, reflexive, and responsive processes in all phases of research. Especially the preparation phase functions as a period to increase and ensure the knowledge and legal/ethical competences of the entire research team to meet the demands in the countries at stake. (shrink)

A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence is the first-ever multivolume treatment of the issues in legal philosophy and general jurisprudence, from both a theoretical and a historical perspective. The work is aimed at jurists as well as legal and practical philosophers. Edited by the renowned theorist Enrico Pattaro and his team, this book is a classical reference work that would be of great interest to legal and practical philosophers as well as to jurists (...) and legal scholar at all levels. The work is divided in two parts. The theoretical part (published in 2005), consisting of five volumes, covers the main topics of the contemporary debate; the historical part, consisting of six volumes (Volumes 6-8 published in 2007; Volumes 9 and 10, published in 2009; Volume 11 published in 2011 and Volume 12 forthcoming in 2016), accounts for the development of legal thought from ancient Greek times through the twentieth century. Volume 12 Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Civil Law World Volume 12 of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, titled Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Civil-Law World, functions as a complement to Gerald Postema's volume 11 (titled Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Common Law World), and it offers the first comprehensive account of the complex development that legal philosophy has undergone in continental Europe and Latin America since 1900. In this volume, leading international scholars from the different language areas making up the civil-law world give an account of the way legal philosophy has evolved in these areas in the 20th century, the outcome being an overall mosaic of civil-law legal philosophy in this arc of time. Further, specialists in the field describe the development that legal philosophy has undergone in the 20th century by focusing on three of its main subjects-namely, legal positivism, natural-law theory, and the theory of legal reasoning-and discussing the different conceptions that have been put forward under these labels. The layout of the volume is meant to frame historical analysis with a view to the contemporary theoretical debate, thus completing the Treatise in keeping with its overall methodological aim, namely, that of combining history and theory as a necessary means by which to provide a comprehensive account of jurisprudential thinking. (shrink)

First, we should separate out the two distinct realms of discourse that are operative in this scandal: the formal legal one, from the informal public one. Each realm has different standards of judgment, and plays a different role. The formal, legal realm is organized to determine the legal guilt of innocence of the individuals accused, while it should be clear that the public realm—that diffuse and loose amalgam of both formal and informal communications—cannot determine individual legal (...) guilt or innocence. First, because it is not privy to all the facts (secrets can still be kept, even in these days of hyper-surveillance), and second, because the public realm of discourse is subject to the influence of various media which is in the business of selling stories. Almost everyone today understands that media reports of all sorts are edited, even when they are upholding the most scrupulous of journalistic standards. (shrink)

The first-ever multivolume treatment of the issues in legal philosophy and general jurisprudence, from both a theoretical and a historical perspective. The work is aimed at jurists as well as legal and practical philosophers. Edited by the renowned theorist Enrico Pattaro and his team, this book is a classical reference work that would be of great interest to legal and practical philosophers as well as to jurists and legal scholar at all levels. The work is (...) divided in two parts. The theoretical part, consisting of five volumes, covers the main topics of the contemporary debate; the historical part, consisting of six volumes, accounts for the development of legal thought from ancient Greek times through the twentieth century. The entire set will be completed with an index. Volume 6: A History of the Philosophy of Law from the Ancient Greeks to the Scholastics 2nd revised edition, edited by Fred D. Miller, Jr. and Carrie-Ann Biondi Volume 6 is the first of the Treatise’s historical volumes and is dedicated to the philosophers’ philosophy of law from ancient Greece to the 16th century. The volume thus begins with the dawning of legal philosophy in Greek and Roman philosophical thought and then covers the birth and development of European medieval legal philosophy, the influence of Judaism and the Islamic philosophers, the revival of Roman and Christian canon law, and the rise of scholastic philosophy in the late Middle Ages, which paved the way for early-modern Western legal philosophy. This second, revised edition comes with an entirely new chapter devoted to the later Scholastics and an epilogue on the legacy of ancient and medieval thought for modern legal philosophy, as well as with updated references and indexes. (shrink)

Laws, ordinances, regulations, and executive orders create the powers and duties of public health agencies and modify the complex community conditions that affect health. Appropriately trained legal counsel serving as legal advisors on the health officer's team facilitate clear understanding of the legal basis for public health interventions and access to legal tools for carrying them out.Legal counsel serve public health agencies via different organizational arrangements — e.g., internal staff counsel, external counsel from the (...) state attorney general's office, state health department, county or city, or private counsel under contract, or in combination. As of 2011, most state health departments employ their own counsel, and 56% use AG counsel, while 17% contract with independent attorneys; most local health departments work with attorneys and legal staff assigned by local government, by the state health agency, or contract with outside attorneys and legal staff. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFor ten years, General Motors denied that an ignition switch that could easily be turned to ‘Off’ constituted a safety defect. Accidents, deaths and injuries resulted. Despite many, many suits against GM, the problem remained uncorrected. The explanations that have been proffered are interrogated in this article and others are suggested. It concludes that a bureaucratic legal department is partly to blame, and criticises how the legal department evaluated cases by their settlement value. It criticises GM’s culture of (...) blaming drivers for accidents. It concludes that the main problem at GM was not bureaucracy, but poor organisation of team management. GM was not organised for accountability without hierarchy. The article suggests that lawyers can play a key role in improving corporate decision making. (shrink)

Background In April 2019, our hospital transitioned to an electronic patient record system and patient portal. MyGOSH enables young people aged 12 years or older and their parents to access results, documentation, appointments, and to communicate with their care team. Aims A focus group was conducted to explore the ethical and legal considerations of young people and their parents using a patient portal from the perspective of hospital Ethics Committee members. Participants and research context Members of the hospital (...) Paediatric Bioethics Centre were recruited. Written informed consent was provided by all participants. Research design The focus group discussion was recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. Ethical considerations Health Research Authority Research Ethics Committee Approval was granted by London Southeast REC. Results Four themes, and sub-themes, were identified: granting access – complexities of assessing competence/capacity, exclusion from MyGOSH due to non-disclosure of diagnosis, and truth-telling; inequalities resulting in inequities – complexities of inequity in access; responding to change – providing support and managing expectations; engagement, empowerment and understanding – data safety, empowering young people to take ownership of their health data, a one-size fits all system may not meet the needs of all families, and early engagement with young people/parents. Discussion Giving families portal access can increase engagement, empowering them to be more involved in care, yet poses challenges for all. Complexities exist in the assessment for portal access, and supporting and managing user expectations whilst providing an equitable service. Conclusions Ongoing support is required for all stakeholders following patient portal implementation to navigate the ethical and legal complexities, and to promote equity and portal utility for patient benefit. (shrink)

This article deals with the qualitative approach to empirical studies. This approach is presumed to be closer to the social sciences. Data collection in the qualitative approach follows a combination of these three methods—direct observations, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. It typically starts with the identification of methodology, data collection, analysis, ethical concerns, and adapt to the dynamics if working in a team. Well-compiled qualitative research enhances comprehensibility of social phenomenon. The technique used in the selection of data collection (...) depends on the research question, leading to the research strategy that best fits the research objective, availability/access to particular data sources, and available resources. While various beliefs are held in common between the quantitative and the qualitative, a researcher must first assert the purpose and nature of the project, in order to come to a deterministic conclusion as to which approach is best suited for the research to be conducted. (shrink)

Confidentiality of health information is increasingly relevant in the era of electronic medical records. We discuss the case of a hospitalized patient who requested a neurology consultation for an episode he described as an “LSD-like” (Lysergic acid diethylamide) flashback. The patient expressed concern that the episode was a residual effect of past drug use, but subsequently requested that his drug use not be documented. Involved in a custody battle, he feared that if his records were released to the court he (...) could lose custody of his children. Ethical concerns arose with regards to the physician’s competing obligations with a duty to record information accurately and honestly, respect patient autonomy, and maintain patient confidentiality. We discuss the decision of the team to document the patient’s drug use by arguing that the obligation to maintain confidentiality did not supersede the primary role of the medical record as a complete and accurate account, which cannot be altered at a patient’s behest. (shrink)

This article deals with the qualitative approach to empirical studies. This approach is presumed to be closer to the social sciences. Data collection in the qualitative approach follows a combination of these three methods—direct observations, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. It typically starts with the identification of methodology, data collection, analysis, ethical concerns, and adapt to the dynamics if working in a team. Well-compiled qualitative research enhances comprehensibility of social phenomenon. The technique used in the selection of data collection (...) depends on the research question, leading to the research strategy that best fits the research objective, availability/access to particular data sources, and available resources. While various beliefs are held in common between the quantitative and the qualitative, a researcher must first assert the purpose and nature of the project, in order to come to a deterministic conclusion as to which approach is best suited for the research to be conducted. (shrink)

The pace of change and, indeed, the sheer number of clinical ethics committees has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Committees were formed to support healthcare professionals and to operationalise, interpret and compensate for gaps in national and professional guidance. But as the role of clinical ethics support becomes more prominent and visible, it becomes ever more important to address gaps in the support structure and misconceptions as to role and remit. The recent case of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (...) NHS Foundation Trust v MX, FX and X, [21]–[23] and [58]) has highlighted the importance of patient/family representation at clinical ethics committee meetings. The court viewed these meetings as making decisions about such treatment. We argue that this misunderstands the role of ethics support, with treatment decisions remaining with the clinical team and those providing their consent. The considered review by clinical ethics committees of the moral issues surrounding complex treatment decisions is not a matter of determining a single ethical course of action. In this article, we consider current legal understandings of clinical ethics committees, explore current concepts of ethics support and suggest how they may evolve, considering the various mechanisms of the inclusion of patients and their representatives in ethics meetings which is not standard in the UK. (shrink)

The article considers the changes that have affected European border regimes of migration control as a testcase for discussing arbitrariness. The argument highlights the limited capacity of notions of arbitrariness defined as a departure from the rule of law to capture the ongoing conflict at the borders of Europe and brings, instead, to the foreground the ambivalent meaning of arbitrariness. By comparing Santi Romano’s classical theory of legal pluralism with recent analyses of legal globalization processes, arbitrariness emerges (...) either as an authoritative attempt to impose a different order on society or as a means to contrast acts of resistance to border regimes. In both cases, arbitrariness forcefully blurs the limits between the ordered and unordered, indicating the paradoxical impossibility of excluding the law’s outside from the legal order. On these premises, the article advocates the importance of reframing the demand for open borders as a call for freedom of those who challenge the pragmatic order of migration regimes. Indeed, arbitrariness is necessarily limited when the legal order recognizes, to an extent, the agency and the claims of subjectivities that resist the dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion. Keywords: migration, arbitrariness, borders, legal order. (shrink)

In an effort to respond to the large surge in COVID-19 cases in Arizona that began between May and July 2020, the Arizona State University (ASU) Student Outbreak Response Team (SORT) formed a remote, volunteer-based case investigation team that worked in partnership with a local public health department through delegated public health authority.

Introduction: Healthcare practitioners have a legal, ethical and professional obligation to obtain patient consent for all healthcare treatments. There is increasing evidence which suggests dissonance and variation in practice in assessment of decision-making capacity and consent processes. Aims: This study explores healthcare practitioners’ knowledge and practices of assessing decision-making capacity and obtaining patient consent to treatment in the acute generalist setting. Methods: An exploratory descriptive cross-sectional survey design, using an online questionnaire, method was employed with all professional groups invited (...) via email to participate. Data were collected over 3 months from July to September 2015. Survey content and format was reviewed by the liaison psychiatry team and subsequently contained five sections (demographics, general knowledge and practice, delirium context, legal aspects and education/training). Descriptive, univariate and bivariate analysis of quantitative data and qualitative content analysis of qualitative data were undertaken. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the institutional Human Research and Ethics Committee and informed consent was taken to be provided by participants upon completion and submission of the de-identified survey. Results: In total, 86 participants engaged the survey with n = 24, exiting at the first consent question. Almost two-thirds of respondents indicated that all treatments required patient consent. Knowledge of consent and decision-making capacity as legal constructs was deficient. Decision-making capacity was primarily assessed using professional judgement and perceived predominantly as the responsibility of medical and psychology staff. A range of patient psychological and behavioural symptoms were identified as indicators requiring assessment of decision-making capacity. Despite this, many patients with delirium have their decision-making capacity assessed and documented only sometimes. Uncertain knowledge and inconsistent application of legislative frameworks are evident. Many participants were unsure of the legal mechanisms for obtaining substitute consent in patients with impaired decision-making capacity and refusing treatment. Conclusion: The legal context of decision-making capacity and consent to treatment appears complex for healthcare practitioners. Professional, ethical and legal standards of care in this context can benefit from structured education programmes and supportive governance processes. An understanding of why ‘duty of care’ is being used as a framework within the context of impaired decision-making capacity is warranted, alongside a review of the context of Duty of Care within health policy, guidance and faculty teaching. (shrink)

In the past 50 years, an ethical-legal boundary has been drawn between treatment and research. It is based on the reasoning that the two activities pursue different purposes. Treatment is aimed at achieving optimal therapeutic benefits for the individual patient, whereas the goal of scientific research is to increase knowledge, in the public interest. From this viewpoint, the patient’s experience should be clearly distinguished from that of a participant in a clinical trial. On this premise, two parallel and mutually (...) exclusive regimes have been established. Yet in the case of deep brain stimulation (DBS), this presentation is a poor fit, for both the patient’s lived experience and medical practice and research. The frictions may be explained by the specificities of the treatment (including surgery and medical devices) and of the pathologies concerned (chronic and evolutive), and by the characteristics of the medical team implementing the treatment. These particularities challenge the dominant frame of reference in medical bioethics and cause difficulties for the current legal framework in fulfilling its dual role: to protect patients while supporting the development of innovative treatments. The dominant model is still the clinical trial for medication safety and legal requirements of drug market regulation. However, DBS forces us to reflect on a medical device that is permanently implanted in the brain by highly specialized multi-disciplinary neurosurgical teams, for the treatment of chronic evolutive diseases. These devices demand fine-tuning on a case-by-case basis and there is still a lot to discover about why DBS is effective (or not). As a result, the wall between treatment and research is osmotic: many discoveries are made incidentally, in the course of treatment. The following study begins with these observations, and suggests that we review legal provisions (especially in French and United States law) so that they are better adapted to the first-person needs and experience of the patient undergoing brain stimulation. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, we have seen an increase in the use of medical-legal partnerships in health-care and/or legal settings to address health disparities affecting vulnerable populations. MLPs increase medical teams' capacity to address social and environmental threats to patients' health, such as unsafe housing conditions, through partnership with legal professionals. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses guidelines, we systematically reviewed observational studies published from January 1993-January 2016 to investigate the capacity of (...) MLPs to address legal and health disparities. We identified 13 articles for qualitative analysis from an initial pool of 355 records. The resulting pool of 13 articles revealed more information regarding the capacity of MLPs to address legal outcomes than their capacity to address health outcomes; only 4 studies directly addressed the impact of MLP intervention on patient wellbeing and/or patient utilization of healthcare services. We call for further evaluation/longitudinal studies that specifically address MLPs' short and long term effects upon patient health disparities. Finally, given the demonstrated capacity of MLPs to address unmet legal needs, and their evident potential in regards to improving health outcomes, we present the MLP model as a framework to address HIV-related legal and health disparities. (shrink)