Care workers and families often engage in deception in everyday interactions with people affected by dementia. While benevolent deception can be justified, there are often more respectful and less risky ways to help people with dementia seeking to make sense of their lives.

Transitional justice (TJ) is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. While recent critical TJ scholarship has touted the transformative potential of locally rooted mechanisms as a possible means to emancipate TJ, this burgeoning literature rests on shaky assumptions about the purported benefits of local TJ and provides inadequate attention to local-national power dynamics. By taking these factors into consideration, this article contends that local TJ efforts can be used to deflect justice in manners that paradoxically allow ruling parties to avoid human rights accountability and to conceal the truth about wartime violations. It further argues that the principal method by which justice is subverted is not through overt manipulation by abusive governments, but rather, through subtle and indirect ‘distortional framing’ practices, which ruling parties use to set discursive limits around discussions of conflict-related events and to obfuscate their own serious crimes. After developing this argument theoretically, the case study of Cambodia is considered in detail to reveal and to trace the processes by which distortional framing has been used as a technique to deflect justice.

The Caduceus in Court welcomes readers to submit articles on legal updates and discussions of issues in healthcare law to Ben Rich at barich@ucdavis.edu.

In 1902, Albert Moll, who at that time ran a private practice for nervous diseases in Berlin, published his comprehensive book on medical ethics, Ärztliche Ethik. Based on the concept of a contractual relationship between doctor and client, it gave more room to the self-determination of patients than the contemporary, usually rather paternalistic, works of this genre. In the first part of the present paper this is illustrated by examining Moll’s views and advice on matters such as truthfulness towards patients, euthanasia, and abortion. The second part of this article discusses how Moll engaged with the then publicly debated issues of experimentation on hospital patients and the ‘trade’ of foreign private patients between agents and medical consultants. In both matters Moll collected evidence of unethical practices and tried to use it to bring about change without damaging his or the profession’s reputation. However, with his tactical manoeuvres, Moll made no friends for himself among his colleagues or the authorities; his book on ethics also met with a generally cool response from the medical profession and seems to have been more appreciated by lawyers than by other doctors.

The issue of patients' rights has become an important part of modern health care practice due to patients being much more aware of what they can expect from health care professionals when they enter the health care environment. This paper commences by explaining what rights are, followed by a discussion of two fundamental rights issues considered important in the relationship between patients and health care professionals in order to ensure good health care practice.