Patients’ Rights and the Epidemic: On the Law, Justice, and the Self

The present article investigates, from a theoretical point of view, the multi-layered nature of patients’ rights as the centremost forms of personal rights. It aims to explore their and more generally the law’s ability to effectively adapt to emergencies such as the recent public health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic whilst still upholding some of the key constitutional values like the respect for human dignity, equal treatment, etc. The discussion proceeds from the traditionally western liberal understanding of the individual or the self and the patient as a holder of specific individual rights whilst trying to find out whether such understanding, coupled with a liberal egalitarian approach to just redistribution of scarce medical resources, may last the test of a global disease outbreak.