Decision Making and Problems Incompetence

From The Critics

Reviewer: Ryan J. Meade, JD(Katten, Muchin & Zavis)
Description: This quick reading book, composed of 12 papers delivered at a health care ethics and law conference in April 1991 in London, is the eighth volume in a medicolegal series.
Purpose: The editor addresses the difficulties in grappling with surrogate decision making for incompetent persons. The book explores how a multitude of jurisdictions in the English speaking world have handled medical decisions for incompetents.
Audience: This volume is written from the perspective of the United Kingdom, including materials concentrating on American and Canadian matters. These papers address the specific situation of the legal and medical community of England, a country that has enacted very little surrogate decision making law. Although certainly of interest to English lawyers and physicians, most of the book should be easily understandable to the population at large.
Features: In keeping with the ancient norms of legal writing, this book is scrupulously footnoted. American readers might encounter some difficulty deciphering foreign citations. Valuable ethical musings underlie the discussions, but they are couched in possibly obsolete 1991 law.
Assessment: Because this volume focuses on the development of incompetency law in the U.K., the American reader will find much of this book uninteresting and irrelevant. The structure yearns to find a consensus on surrogate decision making in order to aid England, but it ultimately fails. It is difficult to offer an American national consensus in this area because the law is so state-specific and even more so in launching the project of an anglo consensus. The result is transatlantic confusion of cases and statutes popping up from a flurry of U.S., British, and Canadian jurisdictions — not to mention an occasional Australian case for good measure. If a library has purchased the other seven volumes or specializes in British affairs or comparative medical law, then this volume should be purchased.

Ryan J. Meade

This quick reading book, composed of 12 papers delivered at a health care ethics and law conference in April 1991 in London, is the eighth volume in a medicolegal series. The editor addresses the difficulties in grappling with surrogate decision making for incompetent persons. The book explores how a multitude of jurisdictions in the English speaking world have handled medical decisions for incompetents. This volume is written from the perspective of the United Kingdom, including materials concentrating on American and Canadian matters. These papers address the specific situation of the legal and medical community of England, a country that has enacted very little surrogate decision making law. Although certainly of interest to English lawyers and physicians, most of the book should be easily understandable to the population at large. In keeping with the ancient norms of legal writing, this book is scrupulously footnoted. American readers might encounter some difficulty deciphering foreign citations. Valuable ethical musings underlie the discussions, but they are couched in possibly obsolete 1991 law. Because this volume focuses on the development of incompetency law in the U.K., the American reader will find much of this book uninteresting and irrelevant. The structure yearns to find a consensus on surrogate decision making in order to aid England, but it ultimately fails. It is difficult to offer an American national consensus in this area because the law is so state-specific and even more so in launching the project of an anglo consensus. The result is transatlantic confusion of cases and statutes popping up from a flurry of U.S., British, and Canadian jurisdictions—not tomention an occasional Australian case for good measure. If a library has purchased the other seven volumes or specializes in British affairs or comparative medical law, then this volume should be purchased.

3 Stars from Doody