LAW 7454 - Forensic Medicine.

2 to 3 Credit Hours

Description
This is an elective course. This is an interdisciplinary course exploring the interaction between the practices of law and medicine. The course highlights the challenges and advantages of using forensic medicine in legal proceedings and how it affects the fields of health and law. It addresses subjects such as toxic causation, disease epidemiology, vaccination litigation, paternalistic medicine, medical malpractice, fraud and abuse, government/regime sponsored experiments, mental health problems, and issues associated with the beginning and end of life. In class, students will be able to identify controversy and common ground and work on problem-solving techniques in cases that both reply upon and sometimes criticize forensic medicine. The course will improve understanding about how law and medicine interact to create public policy and impact public perception. Students will write a final paper for the course that examines a specific area of forensic medicine and how the legal system has, continues to, and, in the future, will shape that practice.