Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Keywords

medical ethics, juveniles, minors

Abstract

Legal and ethical regimes relating to adolescent medical decision making resemble what Judge Frank H. Easterbrook derisively called “the Law of the Horse”: Many laws deal with horses, he wrote, but there is no such field as “horse law.” Similarly, even though the United States has juvenile and family courts, as well as pediatric and adolescent medical departments, there is not a distinct field of “adolescent medical decision-making law” or ethics; there are just many disparate policies that implicate or impinge upon decisions made by adolescents. These include state laws ranging from those that permit minors to seek treatment for substance misuse or mental illness without parental consent to those that prohibit tattoo parlors from serving minors even with parental consent. They also include ethical norms that inform hospital and clinic policies about whether minors may refuse life-extending medical treatment over their parents’ objections or whether parents may compel their children to have cosmetic procedures without the child’s agreement. At first glance, this range of policies might seem less coherent and productive to mine as a unified body of legal and ethical norms than even “horse law.”

But there is a deeper connection between adolescent decision-making law and ethics and “the Law of the Horse,” one that suggests that adolescent decision making may not be the disparate collection of regimes that it appears to be. The legal and ethical norms relating to adolescent decision making illuminate more general issues about how legal and ethical doctrines incorporate scientific information about human cognition and development. Since the existence of separate laws and ethical norms for adolescents and adults is premised on actual differences between them, some kind of consensus about the nature of those differences ought to unify the “law and ethics of adolescent medical decision making.” But it does not. By working through examples of how legal and ethical doctrines interact with issues of adolescent decision making, we can elucidate a set of general questions about doctrinal reliance, or lack thereof, on neuroscientific evidence about human development and behavior.

This piece serves as the Introduction to a symposium issue of the Journal of Health Care Law & Policy, which presents a collection of essays that coalesce around the regulation of adolescent decision making in light of current research on brain development.

Publication Citation

15 Journal of Health Care Law & Policy 1 (2012).

Disciplines

Juvenile Law | Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

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