Do Hospitals Owe A So-Called ‘Non-Delegable’ Duty of Care to their Patients?

Do doctors owe a special duty of beneficence to their patients?

The continuing debate in these pages about whether or not doctors are among those groups in society who have special, supererogatory moral obligations to their clientele seems important enough to pursue, even at the acknowledged risk of boring some readers. In this issue Professor Downie furthers the discussion by arguing against three claims defended in a previous editorial (1). Those claims w...

Do Physicians Have an Ethical Duty to Repair Relationships with So-Called "Difficult" Patients?

This essay argues that physicians hold primary ethical responsibility for repairing damaged patient-physician relationships. The first section establishes that the patient-physician relationship has an important influence on patient health and argues that physicians' duty to treat should be understood as including a responsibility to repair broken relationships, regardless of which party was "r...

Parental liability for preconception negligence: do parents owe a legal duty to their potential children?

So-Called Non-Subsective Adjectives

The interpretation of adjective-noun pairs plays a crucial role in tasks such as recognizing textual entailment. Formal semantics often places adjectives into a taxonomy which should dictate adjectives’ entailment behavior when placed in adjective-noun compounds. However, we show experimentally that the behavior of subsective adjectives (e.g. red) versus non-subsective adjectives (e.g. fake) is...

Hospital liability for the right reasons: a non-delegable duty to provide support services.

The goal of the tort system can be reduced to one basic principle: the judiciary imposes legal responsibility on certain actors for certain conduct in order to remedy past harms and influence prospective behavior. Over the course of its existence, our judiciary has designated particular actors deserving of legal responsibility for various reasons. Guiding this imposition, however, is the will a...