Abstract
If as he suggests at the outset, and as I suspect, the point of Professor Brody’s essay is to make the claim that neither the common law nor Judaic law provides us with a model which fully and adequately captures the morality of the patient-physician relationship, then, although he importantly misdescribes the common law model, he is doubtless right. But if, as his conclusion suggests, his point is the further one that the law ought somehow to be reformed so as to reflect accurately the morality of the patient-physician relationship, then his claim is both controversial and unestablished. Since I doubt that Brody really intends to put forth the latter view either as stated or in a form generalized to include other sorts of social relationship, I propose to concentrate my remarks on the set of issues which are entailed by the first claim and largely to ignore the important jurisprudential questions raised by the second.