From end-of-life issues displayed in the Terri Schiavo case to the use of experimental drugs argued in Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach, judges at the medical school also learned that bioethics issues, often involving a range of multidisciplinary expertise, continue to raise legal questions that can end up on court dockets. Yet not all judges were aware that they could draw on bioethics experts or members of a hospital ethics committee to testify in the midst of such disputes.
"Judges need to know that bioethics is a rigorous field of scholarship, which, where relevant, should be of some value to them in their deliberations," said Eric M. Meslin, PhD, director of IU's Center for Bioethics in Indianapolis and an instructor at the judges' school.....
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