Bioethics
A Casebook
Around 1980, I was tapped to teach Bioethics at Wheaton, and seeing so many references to court cases in the literature, I decided to check out the full texts of the decisions for Roe v. Wade, Buck v. Bell, and TVA v. Hill. Those were the days before I had online access to such legal-research sites as oyez.org, so I had to haul down the physical volumes, such as you see behind lawyers in TV ads, and Xerox whatever goodies I might locate therein. I found a treasure trove of material with the help of such resources as Corpus Juris Secundum and the American Law Reports volumes. And then there were the law school reviews, with articles devoted to particular topics, such as the allocation of scarce life-saving resources or informed consent.
I got my first taste of a law library at Lewis University, then located only a few miles east of Wheaton, off Roosevelt Road. Later, I was able to tap into other law libraries (e.g., at the University of Chicago and Texas Tech) and courthouse collections (e.g., in Tarrant Country, Texas). At the beginning, I incorporated a number of these law-school gleanings into my Wheaton teaching, and then, as I headed to seminary in 1981, I began to assemble them in book form, with this volume emerging in 1985 when I was two years into my first pastorate. Along the way, my interest in appellate opinions ranged beyond bioethics to philosophy in general, and a host of other cases provided grist for my mill as I prepared another book, Cases and Maps: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy, noted elsewhere on this site.