There are common situations where what seemed at first like the best decision may result in a suboptimal outcome, squandered opportunities, or poor allocation of resources. These situations are referred to as decision traps. In some cases, people may create their own traps by imposing unnecessary limits or constraints on their choices. One self-created trap is known as failing to “think outside the box”. The trap of functional fixedness can lead people to miss solutions that are in front of them. The over-reliance on heuristics can introduce self-created traps. Other traps include the status-quo trap, the endowment effect, confirmation bias, the sunk-cost trap, the escalation-of-commitment trap, time-delay traps, and collective traps including the Tragedy of the Commons. These and other common decision traps are discussed, along with ways to identify them in advance and measures that can be taken to avoid them.

Chapter 7 begins the move of our focus to a more applied look at critical thinking, specifically through discussion of the nature of problem-solving. Considerations on eureka moments are made and what they imply about solution generation in decision-making spaces. Problem-solving is discussed in a general nature before moving into the specific domain of creative problem-solving, given creative thinking’s common association with critical thinking. These associations are discussed in depth.

Taking a lead from Graeme Laurie’s willingness to ‘think outside the box’ – typified by his more recent work on ‘liminality’ – this chapter has as its thrust the idea that medical jurisprudence needs to speak to more than the leading cases and the nice doctrinal questions. It also needs to get the regulatory environment right for the upcoming technological developments – in genetics, robotics, additive manufacturing, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence,, machine learning etc. – that promise to transform medical practice. Following this line of argument, medical lawyers should think outside the box of Law 1.0, where traditional legal principles, concepts and precedents are applied to new technologies and novel applications; engage with the regulatory challenges, including the challenges of regulatory connection and effectiveness but particularly that of regulatory legitimacy, that are the subject of Law 2.0 thinking; and join the embryonic Law 3.0 conversation, which contemplates not only smart technological solutions to regulatory problems but also humans being taken out of the loop (as both regulators and regulatees).