Health care ethics experts in Canadian courts.

Sitting in my office one afternoon, I received a telephone call from a lawyer many miles away. W ould I consider acting as an ethics expert witness in a civil case raising questions about the ethics of a particular physician’s conduct? The question certainly caught me off guard. I had known several individuals who had acted as ethics experts in litigation and had wondered in passing about the nature and appropriateness of that role. However, I had never gone beyond casual reflection. Before responding to the lawyer’s request, I felt that I needed to reflect further on the legal and ethical implications of acting as an ethics expert. This paper is a consequence of that reflection.