Legal Fictions Approach to Organ Donation, with Seema K. Shah
Abandoning the dead donor rule faces practical difficulties, especially as it would require changing current formulation of laws relating to homicide. In this chapter we offer a pragmatic alternative account of vital organ donation that invokes the concept of legal fictions. Current practices of vital organ donation are characterized as based on unacknowledged legal fictions. We advocate making these legal fictions transparent by acknowledging that legal determinations of death in the context of organ donation do not coincide with a biological definition of death. Although vital organs are justifiably being procured from still-living patients, the appeal to legal fictions permits maintaining the dead donor rule as a legal norm. The movement from unacknowledged to transparent legal fictions can be a step on the way to honest public policy that reflects the reality of vital organ donation.
Keywords: legal fictions, status fictions, anticipatory fictions, transparency
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .