Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics. By I. Glenn Cohen. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xxvi, 498. $39.95. An American without health insurance travels to Thailand to undergo bypass surgery for a fraction of the out-of-pocket price at home. An English youth paralyzed from his chest down travels to Switzerland, where it is legal for him to end his life under medical supervision. Two American parents desperate to help their eighteen-month-old baby suffering from a rare neurological disease travel to China for an experimental stem cell treatment. In India, wealthy foreign patients get private rooms and constant medical attention while clinics for locals are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded. In Bangladesh, a black market organ donation trade raises questions about exploitation. What laws should protect these patients? Who should be liable if something goes wrong — and how could victims get into court? What legal and ethical issues are raised when patients seek treatment that is illegal at home? Does medical tourism support local economies or does it divert resources from those who need care at home? Professor I. Glenn Cohen offers a thorough overview of these issues and more. This timely book will prove helpful to policymakers, legal scholars, and patients around the world seeking to understand the social and legal implications of the growing medical tourism industry.
Critical Debates on Counter-Terrorism Judicial Review. Edited by Fergal F. Davis and Fiona de Londras. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 2014. Pp. ix, 376. $110.00. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Western governments have enacted many controversial counterterrorist measures, often through unilateral executive action. According to Dr. Fergal Davis and Professor Fiona de Londras, editors of Critical Debates on Counter-Terrorism Judicial Review, executives are unlikely to exercise these new powers responsibly if left to their own devices. In order to ensure adherence to constitutional norms, the other branches of government must subject the executive’s counterterrorist activity to legal scrutiny. But what form should this review take? The fourteen essays collected in this volume, written by legal scholars from the United States and Europe, offer a range of perspectives on that question. The essays explore, among other topics, the institutional limitations on the judiciary in the national security context, alternatives to the court-centered model of counterterrorism judicial review, and the proper role of international law in domestic adjudications. Though the authors hold divergent views on counterterrorism judicial review, they share a commitment to preserving constitutional safeguards in an age of seemingly permanent emergency powers.