Marriage Capacity, Social Values and Law-Making Process

Title to Property, Title to Marriage: The Social Foundation of Adverse Foundation and Common Law Marriage

Competency and common law: why and how decision-making capacity criteria should be drawn from the capacity-determination process.

Determining competence to request physician-assisted suicide should be no more difficult than determining competence to refuse life-prolonging treatment. In both cases, criteria and procedures should be developed out of the process of actually making capacity determinations; they should not be promulgated a priori. Because patient demeanor plays a critical role in capacity determinations, it sh...

Medicolegal sidebar: the law and social values: conformity to norms.

T he last two articles published in the Medicolegal Sidebar addressed the complex interplay between the law and social values [1, 2]. Sometimes, court decisions may appear to be arbitrary and unfair to the medical profession, but a deeper examination of judicial rulings can show the practical tensions that courts sometimes face in adjudicating medical malpractice claims. We previously addressed...

Analyzing law-making from a business process view: The paradox of law-making

REQUIRED) The law-making process is the source of legislation and is inextricably bound up with the developments of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of e-government. Against this backdrop, both the normative law-making process (as prescribed in law) and the law-making processes as found in practice are being analyzed. Both types of processes are modeled using Business Process Modeling...

Law and psychiatry: a stormy marriage.

The domestic tranquility of the law and forensic psychiatry has been disturbed recently by an escalated request that psychiatric experts be excluded from court trials. Still, separation of the parties is not imminent and divorce seems unthinkable, although disharmony exists. Disquiet over psychiatric testimony is not new; numerous judicial statements can be found in case law over the years rema...