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“Yes, the video makes it clear that this is what happened. A reason why medical staff should know clearly that they do NOT have the right to make legal decisions. They should keep their focus on providing healthcare only and pass the legalities onto others as soon as they come up, hopefully where they are more familiar with practices and the arguments that will be used.”
By far, most legal decisions are made by persons untrained in law. There’s no way around it. We have black-letter law, and we have common law. The citizenry is held accountable by both yet is trained in neither. We can’t carry lawyers around in our pocket to make all the decisions we need to make on a routine basis. For many hospitals it’s become routine whether they can or should honor the request of a youth to refuse or have treatment under a theory of “mature minor”.
So what do doctors and hospital administrators do? They attend educational events. They hire attorneys to train medical staff on how to make better decisions with legal consequences. They have their own in-house experience to draw from, or personal experience. But ultimately medical clinicians make most decisions themselves.
Probably the decision that most often ends up before a judge is not whether to give or refrain from giving blood to a minor based on a theory of “mature minor” but, rather, when a decision is made by medical staff that a court order is necessary. Then hospital administration appeals to the local court system to render a decision. But one way or another the decision to appeal to a local judiciary was made by a legal layperson, whether of hospital staff or a patient.
Marvin Shilmer