The rapid development of medical science and technology without attention to ethical values has raised moral issues in the field of obstetrics. Medical professions have found themselves in a dilemma because they all geared for the mastery of knowledge and skills in diagnosis and scientific decision-making, but lack the skills needed for ethical assessment. Formal education and training in ethical assessment is needed to help make medical decisions that can be justified. This paper intends to describe a new approach in (...) improving the quality of medical practice in obstetric care based on competence in bioethics and clinical Ethics in accordance with the demand of society in developing countries. Ethics should be observed by every physician as indicated in the “Preamble of Indonesian Code of Medical Ethics”. It includes values such as purity of intention, generosity, humility, sincerity in work, scientific and social integrity, and amity among physicians. Ethics is related to legal aspects, and the two are complementary for achieving good practice in medicine. Obstetric care decisions cannot rely on a single approach; several alternative approaches including feminist ethics and bioethical principles should always be considered in medical decision-making. Consultation with experts in the field or a hospital ethics committee can also be helpful. Therefore no good ethical decision can be made without ethical guidance. (shrink)

So-called transitional justice has become more universal and in doing so now approximates a more general sense of justice, law, or the rule of law. The inquiry of the essay proceeds by way of a brief analysis of ‘transitional justice’ and related qualifying terms, such as ‘restorative’, ‘reconciliatory’, and ‘retroactive’. I consider the plausibility of identifying, deflating, or reducing each of them, with, or, to, the rule of law, or other general justicial notions. I illustrate the analysis, in a condensed (...) form, through a case study of the Preamble to the Carcross/Tagish First Nation Constitution, a particular situation in the context of indigenous politics on the Canadian scene, one that focuses on negotiation of land-claims and self-government agreements in an historical epoch of continuing colonization and partial decolonization. I conclude by proposing that there is positive promise in the perpetual reconstruction of justice, or constitutionalizing. (shrink)

Can rights constitutionalism operate as a social democratic restraint on private power? How should we assess this? Following renewed interest in social democratic legal theory, some propose developing more egalitarian forms of rights constitutionalism as a counterweight to overweening private power in the global economy. Such strategies follow a normative methodology, associated with liberal accounts of legality which emphasize the autonomy of law as an external means of social change. This can be contrasted with traditional social democratic accounts of law (...) as an artifact produced through and in political struggle. This shift of focus to normative argument is at the expense of contextual diagnosis, which remains valuable in questioning whether constitutional strategies can restrain private power in the name of substantive equality. Rights constitutionalism, reflecting its classical liberal roots, continues to protect private power in important ways.; Two strategies, based in innovations in North American and European constitutionalism respectively, have been proposed to overcome this default. First, the Application to State Institutions (ASI) model seeks to extend the reach of constitutional application to include private actors, and; second the Application to Law (LAW) model seeks to extend the scope of rights by requiring all law to conform to constitutional guarantees, including equality. A sociologically grounded analysis of the comparative jurisprudence shows these models retain key elements of the classical liberal framework, such as the state-civil society distinction, and which have in practice militated against any significant democratization of private power. (shrink)