The widespread view — proclaimed by proponents of disability studies, some disability federations, and many disabled people — that there is a human right to inclusive education, was eventually substantiated by international law with the UN Disability Convention (CRPD) in 2006. One of the most discussed issues in disability studies concerns the CRPD; the contributions are legion. Surprisingly, there are hardly any substantial contributions that pay particular attention to the important question of whether inclusive education is a moral human right, and, if so, how this particular human right could be morally justified. A related topic that is frequently discussed concerns the question of whether inclusive education is compatible with the International Bill of Human Rights. Other scholars, such as Theresia Degener, wholeheartedly support the idea that inclusive education is a substantial legal and moral human right.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) aims at empowering people with disabilities by granting them a number of civil and political, but also economic, social, and cultural rights. This is a groundbreaking agreement for all persons with disabilities, especially because it is the first human rights agreement for disabled people, and it is legally binding. For those states who signed it, it also brings various governmental obligations. Implementing the CRPD will clearly be politically challenging and also very expensive for all states, but even more so for poor ones.

Health care insurance schemes, whether private or public, are notoriously unaccommodating to individuals with disabilities. While most nonelderly nondisabled persons in the U.S. are insured through private sources, coverage sources for nonelderly persons with disabilities have traditionally been a mix of private and public coverage. For all age groups, the employment-to-population ratio is much lower for persons with a disability than for those with no disability. Moreover, employed persons with a disability were more likely to be self-employed than those with no disability. As a group, therefore, nonelderly people with disabilities have not been as well positioned as others to obtain private health care insurance because in the U.S., acquiring such coverage usually is employer based.

Making decisions is an important component of everyday living, and issues surrounding autonomy and self-determination are crucial for persons with intellectual disabilities. Adults with intellectual disabilities are characterized by the limitations in their intellectual functioning and in their adaptive behavior, which compromises three skill types (conceptual skills, social skills, and practical skills), and this starts before the age of 18. Though persons with intellectual disabilities are characterized by having these limitations, they are thought to face significant decisionmaking challenges due to their disability. Moving away from this generalization, Article 12 (Equal recognition before the law) of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (herewith called “the Convention”) addresses this issue of decision-making for persons with disabilities, recognizing the right to legal capacity.

Human rights are basic, inalienable, interdependent, and universally recognized rights that are sine qua non for existence and growth of any human to be his best. These human rights are to be enjoyed by all human beings (individually or collectively) by virtue of being human, irrespective of their limitations or disabilities; due to the stated reason, the rights of disabled people as a “group right” are recognized as a third-generation human right.

Often advocates for persons with disabilities are resistant to what might appear to be the banal truism that, at bottom, disability is a decrement in health. Disability advocates have long objected to the “medicalization” of disability, when that means focusing entirely on a person’s underlying impairments and ignoring all of the manifold obstacles in his or her environment — e.g., physical, human-built, attitudinal, social, political, and cultural — that makes living with those impairments at least disadvantageous and socially devalued. Over-medicalization is another and well understood problem that people with disabilities are justifiably concerned about. Yet it is somewhat of a mystery why anyone with an impairment would ever deny, or feel uncomfortable being told, that their impairment is a health problem. Surely, people with disabilities are unhealthy, by virtue of their impairments and to the degree according to the severity of those impairments. How could it be otherwise?

Scientific reports about clinical research appear objective and straightforward. They describe a study's findings, methods, subject population, number of subjects, and contribution to existing knowledge. The overall picture is pristine: the research team establishes the requirements of study participation and subjects conform to these requirements. Readers are left with the impression that everything was done correctly, by the book.

In other places, however, one finds a different and messier picture of clinical research. In this picture, research subjects deviate from the prescribed plan. One author contrasted the “tidy graphics” and “crisp prose” of the New England Journal of Medicine's HIV/AIDS trial publications with reports that subjects shared medications and broke other trial rules. Awareness of this behavior, he wrote, could lead insiders to “conclude that knowledge was resting on something rather less solid than bedrock.”

In recent decades, advances in information technology have given rise to a post-industrial society in which emphasis on the manufacture of material goods has been supplanted by the creation of intellectual property. Indeed, this new “knowledge economy” can be tracked by the exponential growth in patented products across a range of sectors since the 1980s (see Figure 1). According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the number of annual patent applications submitted grew from 112,379 to 520,277 over the past three decades, a 464% increase.

The transformation in the industrial markets has been accompanied by the rise of a new, global institution for coordinating intellectual property rights (IPRs): the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The harmful impact of an adverse event ripples beyond injured patients and their families to affect physicians, nurses, and other health care staff that are involved. These “Second Victims” may experience intense feelings of anxiety, guilt, and fear. They may doubt their clinical competence or ability to continue working at all. Some go on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

Medical institutions long ignored this problem, preferring to believe that adverse events, or “errors,” occur due to incompetence — the unfortunate work of a few “bad” practitioners who deserve, if anything, a reprimand for their negligence. Study after study has rejected this attribution and shown that adverse events in health care stem primarily from systemic flaws, not “bad apples.” Devastating errors, in other words, can, do, and always will happen in the care of competent, well-trained, and caring practitioners.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a “young” disorder formally recognized in the early 1980s, although the symptoms have been noted for centuries particularly in relation to military conflicts. PTSD may develop after a serious traumatic experience that induces feelings of intense fear, helplessness or horror. It is currently characterized by three key classes of symptoms which must cause clinically significant distress or impairment of functioning: (1) persistent and distressing re-experiencing of the trauma; (2) persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness; and (3) persistent symptoms of hyper-arousal. One of the possible symptoms within the second class is difficulty in remembering an important aspect of the traumatic event.

PTSD is not an uncommon condition, with an estimated lifetime prevalence of about 7-9% based on studies conducted in the United States and Canada, with women at higher risk than men. While not everyone who experiences a significant trauma will go on to develop PTSD, about a third will do so. Sexual assault, along with other forms of assaultive violence, pose a comparatively high risk of PTSD.

We argue for the existence of a state constitutional legal right to language. Our purpose here is to develop a legal framework for protecting the civil rights of the deaf child, with the ultimate goal of calling for legislation that requires all levels of government to fund programs for deaf children and their families to learn a fully accessible language: a sign language. While our discussion regards the United States, the argument we make is based on human rights and the nature of law itself, and can likely be adapted to any country.

We begin with an introduction to the biological facts surrounding language acquisition and how these facts impact the deaf child, where lack of language has devastating effects on individuals and negative effects on society in general.

Some form of assisted dying (voluntary euthanasia and/or assisted suicide) is lawful in the Netherlands, Belgium, Oregon, and Switzerland. In order for individual instances of assisted dying to be lawful in these jurisdictions, a valid request must precede the provision of assistance to die. Non-adherence to the criteria for valid requests for assisted dying may be a trigger for civil and/or criminal liability, as well as regulatory sanctions where the assistor is a medical professional.

In this article, we review the criteria and evidence in respect of requests for assisted dying in the Netherlands, Belgium, Oregon, and Switzerland. Our aim is to establish whether individuals who receive assisted dying do so on the basis of valid requests.

The genetic testing and screening of children has been fraught with controversy since Robert Guthrie developed the bacterial inhibition assay to test for phenylketonuria and advocated for rapid uptake of universal newborn screening in the early 1960s. Today with fast and affordable mass screening of the whole genome on the horizon, the debate about when and in what scenarios children should undergo genetic testing and screening has gained renewed attention. United States (US) professional guidelines — both the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG)/American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) statement (1995) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Statement on the genetic testing of children (2001) and the new AAP and ACMG joint policy statement (2013) and technical report (2013) — as well as the old UK guidelines by the Working Part of the Clinical Genetics Society (1994) and the new United Kingdom (UK) guidelines by the British Society of Human Genetics (BSHG) (2010) all give the same answer: genetic testing and screening should only be done if it is in the child’s best interest.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.