The Moot Court in teaching bioethics

The first part of this paper describes the nature of a Moot Court (or Mock Trial) and how it has been used in recent years as a teaching method for students in medicine and nursing at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. A whole day is spent in the enactment of an imaginary court case in which issues in bioethics are raised. Civil and criminal cases are used in alternate years. A considerable degree of realism is maintained except for the occasions when the presiding judge needs to make comments to the students in order to explain what is going on. The realism is helped by the fact that the roles of judge and of legal counsel are played by members of the judiciary and lawyers from the Newfoundland bar. In the second part of the paper there is a discussion of the principal issue that arose in the 1988 Moot Court, namely informed consent. In the third part the secondary legal and moral issues that arose are described and in the fourth part there is a discussion of the interface between law and morality that is illustrated by the issues that came up in the Moot Court.