Elizabeth Wicks, Human Rights and Healthcare

Teachers and students of medical law often struggle with its patchwork-like structure: the field seems composed of subsets of disparate areas of law such as tort, criminal law and administrative law, with hardly any legal principles common to all. What coherence of presentation is achieved in the standard textbooks derives from ethics. An internally consistent ethical perspective on, for instance, the doctor–patient relationship, the values underlying the provision of healthcare and the rights and duties of persons in a political community vis-à-vis each other is relied on to generate the much-needed framework for the understanding of the field as a whole. Against this background, Elizabeth Wicks’ book on Human Rights and Healthcare constitutes an interesting experiment: what happens when, rather than drawing on ethical principles, we try to unpack (and repackage) the familiar range of medical law issues from a human rights perspective? The coverage of Wicks’ book is thus surprisingly traditional. After a brief overview of the sources of relevant human rights law in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 addresses questions of resource allocation (the human rights ‘twist’ being the extent to which courts have taken tentative steps in the direction of a ‘right to treatment’). Chapter 3 is concerned with what would usually be called medical negligence law and no-fault compensation schemes, though Wicks, ever concerned to keep the human rights angle prominent, entitles the chapter ‘Ensuring Quality Healthcare: An Issue of Rights or Duties?’. The next three chapters (4, 5 and 6) discuss the treatment of competent and incompetent patients, and issues of medical confidentiality. Chapter 7 focuses on property rights in the body and its parts, and the following three chapters are concerned with various issues of reproduction (with a discussion of wrongful life and wrongful birth claims tucked away in the chapter on ‘Pregnancy and Freedom of Choice’). The final two chapters address issues at the end of life.

Health care · Human rights · Liability · Medical law · Political science · Sociology · Tort · Ethics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare · Ethics in medical practice · Law · Reproductive Health and Technologies