This Article reviews recent case and statutory law concerning patients who refuse medical treatment. Among the special cases considered are: 1) the competent adult patient who refuses treatment on religious or privacy grounds; 2) the incompetent patient whose own wishes were never expressed, but whose family refuses treatment; 3) the incompetent patient who expressed the wish not to be treated before becoming incompetent; and 4) parents who refuse treatment on behalf of their child.

It is pointed out that recent court decisions have blurred the distinctions between “extradordinary” care and “ordinary” care and between withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. Reference is made to the recent trend toward allowing the family of an incompetent patient to assert the patient’s rights without court intervention either in the form of direct court order or through guardianship proceedings.

Finally, the implications of these legal developments for health care institutions are discussed. A protocol pertaining to incompetent patients is proposed. Health care institutions are encouraged to develop formal policies for dealing with patients who refuse treatment, and to work with their professional associations in lobbying for legislation which will clarify the law in this area.

Until recently, physicians have been the primary health care providers in the United States. In response to the rising health care costs and public demand of the past decade, allied health care providers have challenged this orthodox structure of health care delivery. Among these allied health care providers are nurse practitioners, who have attempted to expand traditional roles of the registered nurse.

This article focuses on the legal issues raised by several major obstacles to the expansion of nurse practitioner services: licensing restrictions, third party reimbursement policies, and denial of access to medical facilities and physician back-up services. The successful judicial challenges to discriminatory practices against other allied health care providers will be explored as a solution to the nurse practitioners’ dilemma.

In 1984, the New Jersey Supreme Court became the first high court to impose liability successfully upon social hosts for the torts of their intoxicated adult guests. The wisdom or folly of that decision, and its social ramifications, have become subjects of widespread discussion. This Case Comment argues that social host liability, in its present form, is an unwise extension of common law principles. Through an examination of the elements of the cause of action proposed, the standards of proof employed, and the public policies weighed by the court, this Comment concludes that social host liability is ill-adapted to furthering the court’s stated goal of reducing drunken driving.

Capital punishment by lethal injection, which was expected to be the most safe and effective of available methods, can produce unusually cruel and inhuman death. In Heckler v. Chaney, inmates sentenced to death by lethal injection, as well as members of both the medical and legal communities, challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) refusal to regulate certain drugs used for capital punishment by lethal injection. By declining to review the FDA’s nonenforcement decision, the Supreme Court also declined an opportunity to reevaluate its standard for determining cruel and unusual punishment, which upholds any method of execution that is no more unusually cruel than existing methods. This Comment examines the propriety of judicial and administrative regulation of capital punishment by lethal injection.