Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law

Medical law is an interdisciplinary field that is greatly influenced by medicine, on the one hand, and by various disciplines of law, on the other. Indeed, it is from comparative legal studies that we learn of the inadequacy of research in this area when it is carried out within the rigid boundaries of conventional subdisciplines of the law. Rather, in addition to the medical expertise necessary to address the issue at hand, an interdisciplinary legal perspective is essential. In this field, the Institute can be proud of its long-standing expertise, developed in the course of carrying out numerous research projects. Established in 1982 in response to the increasing importance of medical issues in the criminal law and criminal policy debate, the section “Law and Medicine” is dedicated in particular to those issues of medical law that implicate aspects of criminal law and those for which the role of the criminal law as a regulatory instrument is key. In addition to engaging in broad comparative legal studies with a focus on the protection of life, the section also addresses numerous questions regarding German medical law and collaborates in interdisciplinary fashion with the Freiburg Forum for Ethics and Law in Medicine (FERM).

Beyond its commitment to fundamental questions, the section also actively responds to current issues. Fundamental questions include the relative roles in malpractice cases of criminal law sanctioning and other types of legal responses, e.g., damage claims or the establishment of procedural prerequisites for the medical profession, as well as the positioning of medical law as an independent discipline in research and in practice. On this subject, the interdisciplinary conference proceedings Perspektiven des Medizinrechts [Perspectives of Medical Law] formulated desiderata and presented conceptual ideas.

Following the conclusion in 2005 of the multinational project Schwangerschaftsabbruch im internationalen Vergleich [The Termination of Pregnancy in International Comparison] with the publication in English of a summary of the multi-volume findings (Abortion and the Law), the section turned its attention to such current issues as legal problems in medically-assisted reproduction and the use of embryos created extra-corporeally for the purpose of research. A major aspect of its involvement in the academic discussion and legal policy debate regarding the reform of the relevant regulations of the Embryonenschutzgesetz [Law Protecting Embryos] and the Stammzellgesetz [Law on Stem Cells] can be seen in the section’s role in the design and execution of the jointly-conducted interdisciplinary project Der Status des extrakorporalen Embryos [The Status of the Extra-Corporeal Embryo]. Individual projects supervised by the section in this area include the dissertations of Silke Hetz (Schutzwürdigkeit menschlicher Klone? [Do Human Clones deserve Protection?]), Irini Kiriakaki (Der Schutz des Menschen und des Embryos in vitro bei der biomedizinischen Forschung [The In Vitro Protection of Human Beings and Embryos in the Context of Biomedical Research]), and Carola Seith (Status und Schutz des extrakorporalen Embryos [Status and Protection of the Extracorporeal Embryo]). Other projects include a schematic overview of the legal status of reproductive medicine in international comparison, which was published on the Internet and is continually updated. Numerous articles have been published on such specific issues as the legal limits on measures optimizing procedures of medically-assisted reproduction and on such fundamental problems as the definition of the term “embryo” and the breadth of protection accorded to entities with developmental potential that are not the result of fertilization (e.g., clones).

At present, the section is conducting a comprehensive project on the role of criminal law in efforts to combat drug counterfeiting.