Barry Davis Fletcher, MDCM (1935–2018)

Davis v. Davis (1992)

In Davis v. Davis (1992), the Supreme Court of Tennessee decided a dispute over cryopreserved preembryos in favor of Junior Lewis Davis, who sought to have the preembryos destroyed over the objections of his former wife, Mary Sue Davis. The decision in Davis, although not binding in other states, suggested a framework for resolving similar disputes in the US. That framework established that cou...

Logan Fletcher

Fred Dretske opens his book Knowledge and the Flow of Information with the assertion that information is objective. In contrast to the common view of information “as something that depends on the interpretive efforts— and, hence, on the prior existence—of intelligent life,” Dretske intends to develop a view of information “as an objective commodity, something whose generation, transmission, and...

Robert Fletcher

Davis v. Davis [Brief] (1992)

This case was the first of its kind to address questions of personhood [5] in the context of in vitro [6] fertilization [7] of a human embryo. It laid a foundation for future cases to work from: specifically, this case established the importance of prior written agreements for disposition of frozen embryos. This was also the first court decision to borrow the word ?pre-embryo? from bioethics to...

Davis v. Davis [Brief] (1992)

This case was the first of its kind to address questions of personhood [5] in the context of in vitro [6] fertilization [7] of a human embryo. It laid a foundation for future cases to work from: specifically, this case established the importance of prior written agreements for disposition of frozen embryos. This was also the first court decision to borrow the word ?pre-embryo? from bioethics to...