::: Executive Director's Message :::

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ASLME provides a forum for high-quality debate, scholarship, and critical thought for the community of professionals at the intersection of law, health care, and ethics. We've been fulfilling this mission since the Society was founded in 1911. A nonprofit educational organization, ASLME's membership includes attorneys, physicians, ethicists, nurses, allied health professionals, academics, and students who come together to examine the crucial health questions of our times.

ASLME has engaged in and helped shape the dialogue at the national level, dealing with such varied issues as managed care decision making and utilization, medical record privacy, pediatric controversies, end-of-life decision making, implications of the human genome project, and pain undertreatment.

Today, as a society we are engaged in debate about monumental issues with far-reaching social ramifications - issues such as genetic testing and research, the dynamics of informed consent and patient autonomy, and legal and medical issues of pain undertreatment. It is our multi-disciplinary composition of concerned professionals that offers our membership a dynamic forum in which to exchange ideas from a wide range of perspectives.

This diverse network and dialogue is our strength.

And our dialogue often leads to important action.

For example, ASLME helped to frame the national debate on pain undertreatment through our Project on Legal Constraints on Effective Pain Relief. This project, funded by the Mayday Fund, initiated the development of the Pain Relief Act, which is a model intended to remove one significant barrier to effective pain relief: the fear of legal sanctions in the prescribing of pain medications.

If you are not already a member of ASLME, I hope you will consider joining us. The benefits of membership in ASLME include:

FREE subscription to the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. This nationally acclaimed, peer reviewed journal is read by 4,500 health care professionals. It provides articles on such timely topics as health care quality and access, managed care, pain relief, genetics, child/maternal health, reproductive health, informed consent, assisted dying, ethics committees, HIV/AIDS, and public health. Issues review significant policy developments, health law court decisions, and books.

FREE subscription to the American Journal of Law & Medicine. This is the premier law review in the United States devoted exclusively to the analysis of issues at the nexus of law and medicine. Issues contain articles and notes - on themes in health law and policy, and on the legal, ethical, and economic aspects of medical practice, research, and education - and health law court decisions.

Members are invited to participate in ASLME-sponsored conferences and may take advantage of discounts on registration and obtain continuing education credits.

Most important, when you join ASLME, you join a community of your colleagues committed ethically to shaping health care for the 21st century. Our multidisciplinary education improves practice.

If you are not already a member of ASLME, I hope that you will join us.

Sincerely,

Benjamin W. Moulton, J.D., M.P.H.
Executive Director