A View from the Clapham Omnibus

Extract

The man on the Clapham omnibus, as common lawyers know, was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century image of the ordinary reasonable man who played an important part in fixing common law standards. As a lawyer with a continuing but general interest in medicine, biotechnology, ethics, and the law, I offer the following comments on the conference's topic of “Health Resource Allocation” from what may approximate the standpoint of an ordinary reasonable man.

How much “health” can a society afford? I do not think that it is possible to maintain that there is a right to health, expressed as an unqualified right to treatment—though I understand that the argument has been raised in the United States that there is a constitutional basis for a claim of entitlement to treatment for civilly committed mental health patients. So far as English law is concerned, the answer to this question is clear. In 1980 the English Court of Appeal dealt with a case in which four people in Staffordshire argued that the health services were insufficient in their area.