We live in a world in which courts crucially shape public policy through constitutional adjudication. This is a book written for that world. It brings together a group of distinguished scholars from many disciplines to examine the Supreme Court's recent decision that statutes prohibiting doctors from helping their patients commit suicide may be constitutional. It offers a guide to that decision and to the larger issues it raises for citizens and scholars alike. It asks everyone's first question: What does the decision mean for today and tomorrow? It asks the lawyer's question: Is the Supreme Court's reasoning clear and convincing? It asks the doctor's question: How will the decision affect the decisions physicians make with their patients? It asks the ethicist's question: Will the decision conduce to wise and just decisions at the end of life? It asks the historian's question: How are we to understand the Court's work in light of our disturbing national experience with euthanasia? Ultimately, it asks the questions citizens need to ask in our new world: Is constitutional adjudication a good way to make public policy? Are courts well equipped--with experience, with doctrine, with wisdom--to make good policy? What role should courts have in making policy in a democracy? Has the Supreme Court made good public policy? What is the right policy for law at the end of life?
Carl Schneider is Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School.

This is a book written across the grain of contemporary ethics, where the principle of autonomy has triumphed.It is an attempt to see the law of medicine, the principles of bioethics, and the encounter between doctor and patient from the patient's point of view. While Schneider agrees that many patients now want to make their own medical decisions, and virtually all want to be treated with dignity and solicitude, he argues that most do not want to assume the full burden of decision-making that some bioethicists and lawyers have thrust upon them. What patients want, according to Schneider, is more ambiguous, complicated, and ambivalent than being "empowered." In this book he tries to chart that ambiguity, to take the autonomy paradigm past current pieties into the uncertain realities of modern medicine.

Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure--requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well. "More Than You Wanted to Know" surveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices?

Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite.

Timely and provocative, "More Than You Wanted to Know" takes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.

Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure--requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well. More Than You Wanted to Know surveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices? Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite. Timely and provocative, More Than You Wanted to Know takes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.

This casebook teaches students to think like lawyers with many kinds of skill-building problems. It teaches them to think about the problems of regulating bioethical issues not just with cases, but with patients' accounts of their illnesses, doctors' reports of their encounters with patients, ethicists' reflections on our duties to ourselves and those around us, researchers' findings on how medical decisions are made, the results those decisions produce, and the impact of various forms of legal regulation. Finally, it teaches students to understand the law broadly with explorations of larger conceptual issues about law and American culture.