Reviews for 1999 Supplement to Bioethics Health Care Law and Ethics

The average rating for 1999 Supplement to Bioethics Health Care Law and Ethics based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-23 00:00:00 Catherine Pehr Three law professors wrote this book. Smith’s a conservative. Schlag is probably a leftist, but spends a lot of time thinking about invisible elephants. I have no idea what Campos is, other than somehow connected with my man David Brockington. If this was a movie, the three'd be solving crimes, or taking the ashes of Derrida to The House on the Rock or saving monkeys. Instead, they wrote this book because they are profoundly dissatisfied with American legal discourse, free to do so because “being in Colorado, we are much too far away from anywhere to feel the civilizing effects of the great institutions.” (vii). It’s basically a bunch of law review articles they’ve written over the years with added connective tissue. At first, I thought their thesis was that most of the academy is wasting its time being normative; the academy is in essence writing amicus briefs to a court that no longer sits. “Judges don’t read law review articles,” they say. “Stop writing them as if they are.” Could be true. But I’ve been clerking twelve years in August, and two out of the three justices I’ve clerked for do read law review articles. One cited Schlag in a law review article as an in-joke, I think. But, okay, they’re in Colorado. I’m in Pugetopolis. As I slogged through the book (took me about a year, I’m embarrassed to admit), I’m not sure what the thesis was. More and more, it seemed like they were deeply disillusioned with the fact that law’s principles are not consistent and, at bottom, undermine each other. Perhaps that there’s no elephant. But see WSFB v. Gregoire (Chambers, J. concurring) (“There is an elephant in the courthouse.”) There are also crocodiles. See Justice Robert Utter, Swimming in the Jaws of the Crocodile, 63 TEX. L. REV. 1025 (1985). Yeah, they’re largely metaphoric, but what of the real world isn’t once it’s embedded into the discourse? Every human institution I’ve ever stared too hard at has revealed itself to be fraught with undermining contradictions and complications. Thomas Jefferson believed that mammoths existed because he believed extinction was impossible. (100). He was fundamentally wrong in how he thought the world worked. Science is the on going process of improving human knowledge. Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death. Movin’ on. I really wanted to like this book. A lot of it is very vivid. I adore Schlag. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s revealing a big secret, that law’s origins and justifications are murky and probably crocodile related. I don’t know a lawyer who doesn’t know that. But I’ve yet to hear an alternative that’s not more depressing.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-21 00:00:00 Tom Wilson For researchers, very academic.