Legal Briefing: Adult Orphans and the Unbefriended: Making Medical Decisions for Unrepresented Patients without Surrogates.

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving medical decision making for incapacitated patients who have no available legally authorized surrogate decision maker. These individuals are frequently referred to either as "adult orphans" or as "unbefriended," "isolated," or "unrepresented" patients. The challenges involved in obtaining consent for medical treatment on behalf of these individuals have been the subject of major policy reports.

Brain death: legal obligations and the courts.

Brain death, or death determined by neurologic criteria, has been legally adopted in all U.S. states for decades.

Legal briefing: coerced treatment and involuntary confinement for contagious disease.

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving coerced treatment and involuntary confinement for contagious disease. Recent high profile court cases involving measles, tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus, and especially Ebola, have thrust this topic back into the bioethics and public spotlights. This has reignited debates over how best to balance individual liberty and public health.

Innovation in the public sphere: reimagining law and economics to solve the National Institutes of Health publishing controversy.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are responsible for the largest proportion of biological science funding in the United States. To protect the public interest in access to publicly funded scientific research, the NIH amended terms and conditions in funding agreements after 2009, requiring funded Principal Investigators to deposit published copies of research in PubMed, an Open Access repository. Principal Investigators have partially complied with this depository requirement, and the NIH have signaled an intent to enforce grant agreement terms and conditions by stopping funding deposits and engaging in legal action.

Legal briefing: Brain death and total brain failure.

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving total brain failure. Death determined by neurological criteria (DDNC) or "brain death" has been legally established for decades in the United States. But recent conflicts between families and hospitals have created some uncertainty.

Legal briefing: informed consent in the clinical context.

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving informed consent.1 We covered this topic in previous articles in The Journal of Clinical Ethics.2 But an updated discussion is warranted.

Legal briefing: home birth and midwifery.

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving home birth and midwifery in the United States. Specifically, we focus on new legislative, regulatory, and judicial acts that impact women's' access to direct entry (non-nurse) midwives. We categorize these legal developments into the following 12 categories.

Legal briefing: the new Patient Self-Determination Act.

This issue's "legal briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving the Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA). Enacted in the wake of the U.S.

Legal briefing: Shared decision making and patient decision aids.

This "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving patient decision aids.This topic has been the subject of recent articles in JCE. It is included in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The troubling persistence of race in pharmacogenomics.

This article is concerned about what may be happening to race and medicine in the "meantime" between today's clinical realities and the promised land of pharmacogenomics where the need for using race in medicine is supposed to fade away. It argues that previous debates over the use of race in medicine are being side-stepped as race is being reconfigured from a "crude surrogate" for genetic variation into a purportedly viable placeholder for variable drug response--to be used here and now until the specific genetic underpinnings of drug response are more fully understood. Embracing the trope of "promise" in pharmacogenomics alongside the idea of using race as a useful interim proxy for genetic variation raises concerns that new diagnostic and therapeutic interventions may reflect or be mapped upon existing social categories of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in a harmful or dangerous manner.

Legal fundamentals of surrogate decision making.

The four previous articles in this series have traced the history of patient autonomy and have identified its ethical and legal foundations. Patient autonomy is highly valued in the United States to the extent that the patient does not lose the right of self-determination when he or she loses the capacity to make health-care decisions for him or herself. The law has devised several tools to promote "prospective autonomy.

The two (institutional) cultures: a consideration of structural barriers to interdisciplinarity.

C. P. Snow's famous Two Cultures essay has become a foil for decades of discussions over the relation between science and the humanities.

Exploiting race in drug development: BiDil's interim model of pharmacogenomics.

This paper explores events surrounding the US Food and Drug Administration's formal approval of the heart failure drug BiDil in 2005. BiDil is the first drug ever to be approved with a race-specific indication, in this case to treat heart failure in 'self-identified black patients'. BiDil has been cast by many as a step toward the promised land of individualized pharmacogenomic therapies.

Functional neuroimaging and the law: trends and directions for future scholarship.

Under the umbrella of the burgeoning neurotransdisciplines, scholars are using the principles and research methodologies of their primary and secondary fields to examine developments in neuroimaging, neuromodulation and psychopharmacology. The path for advanced scholarship at the intersection of law and neuroscience may clear if work across the disciplines is collected and reviewed and outstanding and debated issues are identified and clarified. In this article, I organize, examine and refine a narrow class of the burgeoning neurotransdiscipline scholarship; that is, scholarship at the interface of law and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Patenting race.

As genetic databases continue to yield new insights and inventions, the commercial incentive to conflate race and genetics may be hard to resist.