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10 J. Contemp. Health L. & Pol'y 69 (1994)
Informed Consent - Must It Remain a Fairy Tale

handle is hein.journals/jchlp10 and id is 87 raw text is: INFORMED CONSENT - MUST IT REMAIN A FAIRY TALE?* Jay Katz, M.D.** When the editors of the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Pol- icy asked me to contribute an article to their issue in honor of my friend, colleague and dean, Guido Calabresi, I accepted their invitation with pleasure. Since I had reflected about informed consent for two decades, I welcomed this opportunity to set forth my final thoughts and conclusions, however briefly and summarily, on this doctrine and its impact on physi- cian-patient decisionmaking. This essay gives a good account of what I shall ever be able to say about informed consent. It is appropriate that I choose this topic for this occasion because Guido has had a long standing interest in law and medicine. Twenty-five years ago, he published his remarkable paper, Reflections on Medical Ex- perimentation in Humans,1 and since then he has periodically written on issues in law and medicine. He has not, however, ever explored in depth the problematics of the legal doctrine of informed consent and, to the extent he has, only in the contexts of human experimentation and organ transplantation. If this essay will stimulate this great torts law scholar and teacher to give us his analysis and insights, we can only benefit from his wisdom. In his article on human experimentation, Guido was mainly concerned with one crucial tension inherent in medical research: our fundamental * This essay is a revised and extended version of an address given at the Institute de droit de la sant6 de l'Universit6 de Neuchfitel and the Institute universtaire Kurt Boesch (IKB) -Sion on 6 September 1993. The address was published in the Institute's proceedings under the title Le Consentement Eclairg Doit-Il Rester un Conte de FNes? (1993). I wish to thank Sherwin Nulan and my research assistants Steven D. Lavine and Katherine Weinstein for their thoughtful contributions to earlier drafts of this essay. My wife, Marilyn A. Katz, as always, has commented on the many drafts and I am grateful for her critical wisdom which is reflected throughout this essay. ** Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor Emeritus of Law, Medicine and Psychiatry and Harvey L. Karp Professorial Lecturer in Law and Psychoanalysis, Yale Law School. 1. GUIDO CALABRESI, REFLECTIONS ON MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION IN HUMANS, 98 DAEDALUS 387 (1969).

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