New Scholarship on Medical Futility

Fall classes are over.  I celebrated by handing out a bottle of sparkling wine to each student in Torts.  It was, after all, not just the last class of the semester.  It was also my last class at Widener University.  In January, I begin my new job as Director of the Health Law Institute at Hamline University.  

Even better, in the past few days, I finished turnaround revisions on, and cleaned my desk of five (5) new articles which should now be flowing down the pipeline toward publication:

• "Review of Lawrence J. Schneiderman and Nancy S. Jecker, Wrong Medicine: Doctors, Patients, and Futile Treatment," 12 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS (forthcoming 2012).


• "The Courts, Futility, and the Ends of Medicine," 306 JAMA (forthcoming 2012) (with Douglas B. White).


• "Legal Fundamentals of Surrogate Decision Making," 140 CHEST (forthcoming 2012) (5th in series: Intersection of Law and Medicine).


• "Physicians and Safe Harbor Legal Immunity," 21(2) ANNALS HEALTH L. (forthcoming 2012).


• "Responding to Requests for Non-Beneficial Treatment," 5 MD-ADVISOR: A JOURNAL FOR THE NEW JERSEY MEDICAL COMMUNITY (forthcoming Jan. 2012).

Now, I can turn to tackle a way-too-long list of in-progress projects with upcoming deadlines on:

• Decision making for the unbefriended, patients without proxies (for J. Clinical Ethics)


• American Thoracic Society policy statements on both conscientious objection and futility


• A Cochrane Review on "Advanced Care Planning for End Stage Renal Disease"


• "Futility in the Cardiac Intensive Unit"   


• And (in case any of my editors read this) other new and edited manuscripts