Informed Consent: Legal Issues

We mentioned previously that legal standards for appropriate informed consent disclosure of information often differ from moral standards. In this section we examine legal standards. Unfortunately or not, there are many different legal systems in the United States. Each state has its own set of laws, and in each judges are bound by different precedents. In the United States, as in countries like Great Britain and Canada, the decisions of judges tend to make law. That is, new cases need to be decided, at least typically, in the same way as previous cases. Judges are often influenced by decisions in other states, but the influence on a judge of a higher court within the same state has more binding force.