This outstanding text and reference provides health professionals & students with a balanced, comprehensive, highly readable survey of the legal concepts and controversies affecting them today. Avoiding unnecessarily technical language, it lucidly explains basic legal principles and theories, examines current issues and their implications, and probes future legal trends. Throughout, each chapter offers a complete, self-contained introdu ction to a medicolegal topic--including invaluable endnotes that cite references, clarify perspectives, and suggest further readings. A unique appendix also explains how to use law library facilities to best advantage.

Freidson guides his analysis by finding what power may be ascribed to formal, codified knowledge. He focuses on the institutions that provide intellectual workers with their knowledge, a regular living, organized political resources, and other means with which to translate formal knowledge into human activity. Surveying professionals, he establishes a basic foundation for tracing the sources and means of professional power. Key issues are discussed as to whether they exercise power in the workplace, in government policy-making, and in the shaping of our physical and social world.