Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Objectives Students will develop an appreciation of the different rationales and roles of legal and medical practice, as well as those areas where the concerns and values of both professions coalesce. Law students completing this subject should have an understanding of the structure and organisation of the medical profession, and in that context a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of a number of major issues and concepts fundamental to the doctor-patient relationship, which have implications of a social, ethical and legal kind.
Synopsis Practising law and practising medicine. The framework of the Australian legal system. Basic medical and clinical science. Precedent and statutory interpretation. The adversarial system of litigation. Principles governing clinical medical practice. The foundation of medical ethics. The practice of medicine, and the relationship between medicine and allied health professions. Doctors, patients and the law. The regulation of the medical profession. Medical negligence and consent. Rights to refuse medical treatment, competence and incompetence in law and medicine. Medical confidentiality. Law and psychiatry: civil commitment. The body as property: transplants and therapeutic extracts. Professional ethics in law and medicine: suppressing unethical experimentation. Medical research: volunteers, institutional ethics committees and the law. Medical treatment and the end of life: the aged and the new born. The beginnings of life: novel birth technologies and abortion. Visits program: law students will attend seminars and accompany ward rounds at the Monash Medical Centre for a minimum of two or three days, in the first week of the mid-semester vacation. Medical students will attend a seminar in barristers' chambers, observe a case in court, and spend a day in the office of a firm of solicitors, in the first week of the mid-semester vacation.
Assessment Two class tests: 40% + Research paper (2000 words): 60%