ABSTRACT
Modern bioethics dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s. Health law as a domain characterized by its own casebooks, courses, and specialists arguably began somewhat earlier. The reluctance to face problems of method and difference even as related fields have assumed that challenge can be traced to the failure of bioethics to be self-critical. Part of the challenge to bioethics method comes from an empirical literature provoking fundamental questions about the agreed wisdom. A burgeoning feminist literature has challenged the reigning bioethics paradigm as well. The rise of empiricism and challenge to deductivism in bioethics is mirrored by an intensified empirical investigation of health law's effects. As in the case of the bioethics paradigm shift, the health law shift is guaranteed to provoke anxiety. Pragmatism will urge bioethics and health law to undertake study and work in clinical settings to see how pronounced rights can be made to function for patients and research subjects.
