Chapitre 4. Normativity and Biomedicine in the USA

Abstract

Legal norms regulating biomedicine in the United States are constantly under development – many of them at the level of individual state laws, rather than national law, and in the form of decisional “common law,” rather than statute or administrative law. Principles of medical ethics are frequently an important source of such norms, but American values emphasizing individual liberty have tended to produce legal principles that give much greater recognition to patient autonomy than is traditional in the profession. This phenomenon is well-illustrated by the development of the law of the “right to die.” The extent to which the development of such legal norms has the capacity to effectively change the behavior of physicians is unclear, however. Certainly, in the area of the “right to die,” there is evidence that physicians do not feel themselves bound by patient’s wishes to the extent that the law has come to require.