LAW719

Letter Grading, Writing Requirement

GPA SEMINARS

May satisfy Writing Requirement. This seminar focuses on bioethical and legal analysis of various challenges, problems, and controversies in health care decisionmaking. Students are introduced to modern bioethical frameworks, corresponding legal doctrines, and analysis of relevant historical events and trends. Throughout the semester, we apply bioethical principles to an examination of biases and inequities related to race, class, socioeconomic status, gender and other factors that contribute to health disparities among groups in our society. The seminar examines culturally sensitive, comparative, critical race, and feminist perspectives on various topics. The course is interdisciplinary, and therefore, along with law and bioethics sources, we consider materials from health sciences, neuroscience, psychological science, philosophy, and fiction. In addition to writing a substantial scholarly paper on a topic of the student's choice, students will engage in various exercises (such as preparing their own advanced directive) and are encouraged to use a variety of creative formats when providing written reflections of readings and films that are assigned throughout the semester. The topics covered in the seminar may vary from year to year to accommodate changing technologies and emerging debates, and will include a selection of the following: (i) concepts of "personhood," life, and death (such as when a human organism is or should be regarded as a "person" and how death is or should be defined in bioethics and law); (ii) challenges in decisionmaking regarding "potential" life such as embryos and fetuses; (iii) the law, ethics, and science of the doctrine of informed consent (including concepts of information disclosure, competence, and voluntariness); (iv) dilemmas in health care decisionmaking for minors, mentally disabled persons, and persons of uncertain competence; (v) critical issues in end-of-life health care decisionmaking (such as refusals of life-sustaining treatment, requests for physician aid in dying, policies governing advanced directives, models of surrogate decisionmaking); (vi) bioethical, legal, and social challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic; (vii) bioethical and legal controversies surrounding organ and tissue donations (such as proposals to create legally-regulated markets for organs and tissues); and (viii) selected topics in regulation of research involving human participants.