Case studies have recently played a prominent role in the study of ethical issues in planning. To clarify the role that cases can play, this article investigates how two other professional fields (law and medical ethics) have used cases to analyze practical ethics. The author argues that law and medicine use studies to develop “moral taxonomies”—classifications of important cases that help clarify the meaning and limits of ambiguous values, principles, and maxims. Three features characterize case ethics in law and medicine: (1) a focus on hard cases, in which key values or principles are ambiguous or in conflict; (2) use of analogical reasoning to analyze those cases, to determine which previously resolved cases they resemble and which they do not; and (3) identification of low-level principles that underwrite these judgments of similarity and difference and can help inform judgments about future cases.
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