A Caring Jurisprudence

Listening to Patients at the Supreme Court

By (author) Susan M. Behuniak

Publication date:

31 August 1999

Length of book:

208 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780847694549

In deciding the abortion and physician assisted suicide cases, a majority of the Justices of the United States Supreme Court drew on medical knowledge to inform their opinions while dismissing the distinctively different knowledge offered by patients. Following the legal norms derived from the ethic of justice, the CourtOs deference toward the Ouniversal,O Oimpartial,O and OreasonedO knowledge of the medical profession and its disregard of the Oparticular,O Oinvolved,O and OemotionalO knowledge of patients seemed inevitable as well as justified. But was it? This book argues that it is both possible and proper to develop a jurisprudence capable of incorporating the knowledge of patients. Drawing on feminist scholarship, this book proposes a model for a Ocaring jurisprudenceO that integrates the ethic of justice and the ethic of care to ensure that patientsO knowledge is included in judicial decision making.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Three Versions of a Story: Medical, Legal, and Personal
Chapter 3 The Abortion Cases: The Merging of Medical and Legal Knowledge
Chapter 4 The Physician Assisted Suicide Cases: The Triumph of Medical Knowledge over Patients' Knowledge
Chapter 5 A Jurisprudence of Justice and Care: Enabling the Court to Hear the Knowledge of Patients
Chapter 6 Listening to Patients: The Abortion and Physician Assisted Suicide Cases Revisited

This careful, thoughtful, and moving account of the Supreme Court's privacy cases should be of great interest to scholars in all disciplines interested in the Court and of the ideals and practices that guide it. Behuniak's book is a plea to judges at all levels to listen empathically to patients' knowledge and to integrate that knowledge into a more caring jurisprudence. She convincingly traces the inhumane consequences, in our law and in our ideals for law, of their failure, to date, to do so.