Lege artis

Overview

It is a common legal practice that a court will ask an expert to testify whether a doctor behaved “lege artis”. However, this term is misleading and it was substituted by the law about health services for the term adequate level of expertise. Its definition is based on a proposal by the Czech Medical Chamber and it was confirmed by the Czech Constitutional Court. It is important to pay attention to the specific conditions and objective possibilities in the situation when evaluating the work of doctors. Sometimes, there may be issues concerning incompetent expert evidence, when the evidence does not account for the conditions and possibilities of the specific situations and it is, rather, an expression of subjective opinions of the author. The system of selection of experts (judge advocates) from the medical field is treated vaguely by the Czech law and, thus, assigning responsibility for making a faulty judgement has been insufficient so far. A new law concerning court experts (judge advocates) is currently in preparation.

Key words:
medicine – law – lege artis