Who has ultimate responsibility for a child injured on a school trip? A school is going on an excursion. The child is given the permission slip to take home and get signed by his legal guardian, but he forges the signature instead. On the excursion, he gets injured. Who is legally responsible for the child? Is it the school (since the waiver is void, and by default the school is responsible for the child when a roll is taken) or the parent (since the school sincerely thought the parent had signed the waiver and if the waiver was correctly signed then the parent would be responsible)? Preferred jurisdiction Australia; I will accept any answer however.
So many things were not addressed, so a precise answer is not possible. But to try to raise the proper questions you should be thinking about: Should the school have known the permission slip was forged? Was the forgery particularly bad, and the school was lax in not examining it? Did the student have a history of forging slips that the school should have been aware of? If the school was negligent in accepting an obviously bad signature, they may find their exposure is increased. If the school had no reasonable way to know the slip was forged, they were acting reasonably in taking the student on an excursion. Was the injury typical, foreseeable and recoverable? Such as a broken ankle on a hike? Minor accidents happen even when all reasonable precautions are taken. The injury will heal with time and care. Was the activity that lead to the injury inherently risky / dangerous? There is definitely a question of if the school took all reasonable precautions. Even if permission was legitimately given, the school is responsible for taking reasonable precautions, especially if the activity has inherit and obvious dangers. (for example, river-rafting or rock climbing) What sort of &quot;responsibility&quot; are you interested in? If you're asking who is financially responsible for the cost of treating the injury, then regardless of how it occurred, it would likely fall to the child's health insurance (presumably provided by the parents). If the school was truly negligent in allowing a forged permission slip to a dangerous activity, then they could be found responsible for extraordinary costs associated with the injury, other costs (pain, suffering, loss of opportunity, emotional consequences, etc) and perhaps even punitive damages. If you're suggesting that someone might be criminally responsible, then a very high bar would need to be cleared. It would need to be proven that a school representative (eg. teacher or administrator) deliberately put the kid in danger for some reason, knowing what the likely outcome would be. That standard seems extremely unlikey to be met.
A medical practitioner may use whatever methods s/he thinks proper and appropriate, subject to the limits of malpractice law, and to the right of the patient (or patient's parent or guardian for a child) to give informed consent to any procedure or treatment. A patient can not insist on a treatment or method that the doctor or dentist does not wish to perform, having only the right to seek another practitioner. Nor is a practitioner required to use only procedures covered by insurance, unless bound by contract to do so (as may be the case with some &quot;in-network&quot; or HMO agreements). Again, the patient is free to seek treatment elsewhere. So the parent could insist that the dentist not use &quot;conscious sedation&quot; by withholding consent, the dentist may then refuse to treat at all, unless perhaps this was an emergency situation not allowing the parent to seek another treatment venue.
If we go by Indian case law (as we should), you have to find a way. The relevant case is K.P. Adbul Gafoor v. New India Assurance Ltd, where appellant drove on a motor cycle on a learner's permit without a licensed driver positioned correctly, in violation of Rule 3 of the Rules, and smacked someone. The bulk of the case is about the insurance and liability consequences of violating the rule: the main point here is that the court deemed this to violate the rules.
Rights defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are legally irrelevant, what &quot;counts&quot; is rights as actually recognized by a particular nation. Article 9 (&quot;No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile&quot;) corresponds, to a fair extent, to Due Process rights under US law, whereas article 26 (the education article) does not correspond to anything in the US Constitution, though there may be state constitution correlates. Article 28 (&quot;Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized&quot;) isn't enforceable in any meaningful sense. The right to a trial by a jury of one's peers is an example of a right that can be waived – that is a right that you have to option to exercise, each time the question arises. There is no mechanism in the US whereby a person can irrevocably go on record as always waiving that right. Theoretically, Congress could pass a law enabling a person to make some legal choice irrevocably: there are irrevocable financial and contractual decisions, where in the later case you may irrevocably waive your common law right to sue for damages. But the concept of fundamental constitutional rights is so important to the way that US courts think, that I doubt that a law enabling irrevocable waiver of enumerated constitutional rights would pass legal review. A constitutional amendment would be necessary: but that simply means it will be harder, not that it's impossible. Things could be different under a different constitutional framework. It might be possible to waive your Article 30 right to an 8 hour work day or voting rights per Article 66 in North Korea.
Permission is not a physical thing that disappears when a piece of paper evidencing that permission is lost or handed to another party. When someone gives you permission as part of an agreement having the necessary characteristics of a contract, then the revocation of that permission is governed by the terms of the contract itself and your jurisdiction's contract-law. You may not need any permission to use the photos you paid to have taken. (For example, in the U.S. if they were taken in a public place and you are not displaying them for profit.) Or, you might need permission due to various rules or laws protecting minors – only an IP lawyer familiar with your jurisdiction can confirm this is the case – and, unless it was drafted by a competent lawyer, it is quite possible that your "permission statement" was legally insufficient or defective. Or, you might have legally secured necessary permission and still have that permission even though you handed the "permission statement" back to the parents of the subject. In practice: Only a lawyer in your jurisdiction can offer an opinion on which of these scenarios is in fact the case. And only via litigation can you establish further confidence that legal opinion is correct.
The real question is do they have to refund the rest of the summer camp fees if Bob is expelled due to his own intentional misbehavior? Not if the contract was written by a good lawyer, or even by a merely competent lawyer. In that case, the contract will provide that there is to be no refund in the event of expulsion.
School districts / states do generally have the power to set the curriculum including the viewpoint that will be officially conveyed. One well-known major restriction on such viewpoint restrictions is that the schools cannot restrict the free exercise of a religion, and cannot take a position on a religion. Apart from the religion third-rail, schools have pretty free reign in setting the curriculum, see Evans-Marshall v. Tipp City for one instantiation. In this case, the teacher assigned various books, including Heather Has Two Mommies, one of the books that prompted an outcry. The upshot of that case is that a teacher cannot invoke the First Amendment to override policy. This article (draft version, easier to handle) (published version, annoying footnote structure) reviews the topic, and section III covers prior cases. It notes that the cases of Lawrence, Windsor, Obergefell do not address the constitutionality of these education laws, though the reasoning in the prior cases might be applicable if there were a suit over curriculum. There is an implication that some of these rules have been enforced in the past, but most of the evidence is in the form of news stories (Beall v. London City School BOE is not available in the open). The article does engage in a somewhat deeper study of enforcement in Utah, where it was enforced (until it was repealed). Enforcement is necessarily indirect. The law require school districts to have a particular curriculum; violation would come when an individual teacher taught contrary to the prescribed curriculum. Those laws do not contain any provision like "a teacher who violates these rules gets fired", instead, punishment is via the general rule that you have to teach what is in the state-mandated curriculum. Rather than officially terminating a teacher for violating this curricular guideline, districts use vague reasons for non-renewal such as "due to problems with communication and teamwork" (from Evans-Marshall).
Late to the party, but I'll answer anyways. In general, providers have a lot of wiggle room when sharing information with parents, on condition that the patient hasn't explicitly objected despite having opportunity to do so. HIPAA allows the provider to make a judgment call on whether such information can be shared without explicit consent: Quoting Title 45 § 164.510 : (i) Obtains the individual's agreement; (ii) Provides the individual with the opportunity to object to the disclosure, and the individual does not express an objection; or (iii) Reasonably infers from the circumstances, based the exercise of professional judgment, that the individual does not object to the disclosure. HHS does discuss disclosure to family members in their FAQ : A covered entity is permitted to share information with a family member or other person involved in an individual’s care or payment for care as long as the individual does not object. A parent of a child who has just turned 18 is likely still somewhat involved in the child's care, so, absent either an objection or a reason to believe the child would object if asked, sharing is probably not a violation.