Who Knows Best (Interests)? The Case of Charlie Gard

Who Determines Children's Best Interests?

The Charlie Gard case: British and American approaches to court resolution of disputes over medical decisions

INTRODUCTION On 8 June 2017, the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom rejected a legal appeal in the high-profile case of Charlie Gard, a British infant with a severe genetic disorder whose parents had disagreed with medical professionals and were requesting treatment that the doctors believed was futile. The case was the latest in a series of UK legal cases where courts have authorized withdraw...

Who decides the "best interests" of the child?

B was a frail 15-year-old girl who was brought to the hospital by the police. She had met a 22-year-old boy on a social networking site a few months earlier. They had fallen in love and she had started living with him. On finding his daughter missing, B's father reported the matter to the police station. The police caught the couple and brought them to the police station. The boy was arrested. ...

Assessment of post-operative pain in children: who knows best?

Pain assessment in children can be extremely challenging. Most professional bodies recommend that parents or carers should be involved with their child's pain assessment; but the evidence that parents can accurately report pain on behalf of their children is mixed. Our objective was to examine whether there were differences in post-operative pain score ratings between the child, nurse and paren...

Who Knows Best? Education, Partisanship, and Contested Facts

An alert, informed electorate is considered vital to a robust democracy, and the main path to that electorate includes formal education. The educated citizen is politically attentive, knowledgeable, and participatory, and the uneducated citizen is not. However, this fact conceals a less favorable effect of education. Educated citizens possess the cognitive skills to reject facts inconsistent wi...