American culture reflects a paradox: the more openly we discuss death and its inevitability, the more money we spend to postpone and deny it. Sherwin Nuland's book How We Die, a frank description of the way our bodies deteriorate with and without medical intervention, topped the New York Times best seller list in the spring of 1994. At the same time, Jack Kevorkian, arguably the world 's best known physician, was being acquitted of violating Michigan 's law against assisted suicide, while a Michigan commission was debating legislative changes to permit physicians to help their terminally ill patients kill themselves. Despite such open discussion of death and expansion of the informed consent doctrine, U.S. medical expenditures at the end of life remain astronomically high. Most of this elevated spending is attributable to new medical technology.

In J.G. Ballard 's Empire of the Sun, the United States, British and Japanese cultures are contrasted through the eyes of a young British boy incarcerated by the Japanese army in China during World War II.

Neither bioethics nor health law is old as an established discipline. Modern bioethics dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s. Health law as a domain characterized by its own casebooks, courses, and specialists arguably began somewhat earlier. While each has far older precursors, the two fields have seen a modern resurgence in the last thirty years or so. Yet each in these three decades has been dominated by a certain method or paradigm. In bioethics that has come to be known as “principlism, ” deductive reasoning from a limited set of middle-level ethical principles, albeit with some reciprocal attention to the implications of the case at hand for those principles. No comparable term has emerged in health law, and the field has arguably been less enamored of philosophical abstraction. But the pattern has often been similar: the creation of middle-level rules (on informed consent, surrogate decision-making, advance directives and so on) and then their downward application with insufficient attention to the clinical context, the specific characteristics of the disputants (such as insurance status, race or ethnicity, and gender), and whether the rules will actually work in medical settings.

I began teaching Health and the Law in January, 1985. Louise Brown, the world's first “test tube” baby, was six years old. Karen Ann Quinlan, whose ventilator had been disconnected years earlier, was still alive and being tube fed in a New Jersey nursing home. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was a still little understood disease. Although forward looking scholars had been writing important books about access to expensive health care, few legal challenges had been made to alleged treatment (whether ordinary or extraordinary) refusals. Oh, what a difference a decade makes! In keeping with the theme of this issue, this article focuses on law and bioethics in the year 2000, particularly the teaching of bioethics. In some ways the challenges of teaching bioethics in the year 2000, or anytime, are the challenges of teaching any course in the year 2000, or anytime. In other ways, the special topics covered in a bioethics (or any health law) course and the dramatic impact on the area of health law by science, medicine, and technology make the challenges far more difficult than in many other areas of the law.

Health law and medical ethics are both integral parts of undergraduate medical curricula. The literature has addressed the importance of teaching law and ethics separately in medical school settings, yet there have been few descriptions of teaching law and ethics together in the same curriculum. A combined program in law and ethics required for first-year medical and dental students was developed and implemented by Professor Joseph (Jay) M. Healey, Jr., at the University of Connecticut Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine from 1975 until his death in 1993. This Article describes the thirty-hour, interactive, case-based course he created. The course, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Medicine and Dental Medicine (LEA), has continued after Jay 's death, and is one of his many legacies to us. LEA consists of fifty-six actual and hypothetical cases written by Jay from which basic legal and ethical principles are extracted by participants and reinforced by instructors.

During the past three decades, the pages of major newspapers, magazines, and professional journals across the country have chronicled a tragic dilemma confronting persons with mental disabilities. On the one hand are the horror stories of thousands of individuals with mental disabilities locked away in institutions. They live years in isolation or neglect when many could have received treatment and enjoyed fuller lives in the community. Thousands more have endured a different hell in the “freedom” of the outside world, receiving no treatment or support services necessary for their survival, often causing harm to themselves or others as their condition deteriorated. This lack of treatment and support is largely the result of states' failure to shift mental health resources into the community when state institutions released their patients under the policy of deinstitutionalization.

Todos tem direito ao meio ambiente ecologicamente equilibrado. Everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced environment. In 1988, the Brazilian Constitutional Assembly incorporated this imperative into the Brazilian Constitution as part of a chapter on environmental protection. After hundreds of years of environmental ignorance, our planet's inhabitants have experienced a growth of environmental awareness. One global environmental tragedy garnering substantial recent attention is the depletion of the planet's tropical rain forests. In addition to eternally altering the human environment, rain forest destruction poses a serious threat to both the pharmaceutical industry and individuals in need of medical care. A substantial portion of existing pharmaceuticals are plant-based and animal-based, and the pharmaceutical industry continues to explore additional species for medicinal potential, particularly in tropical regions. As mass deforestation of these areas forces countless species into extinction, specimens yet to be analyzed for their pharmaceutical potential will be eternally lost. As one noted conservationist explained, “Even severe pollution is reversible, but species extinction is irreversible.”