A Caring Jurisprudence: Listening to Patients at the Supreme Court

In deciding the abortion and physician assisted suicide cases, a majority of the Justices of the United States Supreme Court drew on medical knowledge to inform their opinions while dismissing the distinctively different knowledge offered by patients. Following the legal norms derived from the ethic of justice, the Court’s deference towards the universal , impartial , and reasoned knowledge of the medical profession and its disregard of the particular , involved and emotional knowledge of patients seemed inevitable as well as justified. But was it? This book argues that it is both possible and proper to develop a jurisprudence capable of incorporating the knowledge of patients. Drawing on feminist scholarship, this book proposes a model for a caring jurisprudence that integrates the ethics of justice and the ethic of care to ensure that patients’ knowledge is included in judicial decision making.