In his book, The Case Against the Supreme Court [5], Erwin Chemerinsky JD, Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, examines the legal decisions issued by the Supreme Court, and concludes that these decisions principally reflect the ideologies or values of the judges. Chemerinsky begins his analysis with the 1927 legal case of Buck v Bell [3]. In his controversial majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. upheld a state statute that allowed involuntary sterilization of the “mentally unfit.” The Buck decision held that the societal value of protecting citizens from the offspring of the intellectually disabled took precedence over the reproductive rights of a group of men and women [3]. This holding is offensive by contemporary standards, but it reflects a balancing of social interests that prevailed at the time. In our previous Medicolegal Sidebar column [2], we described how the evolution of legal principles relevant to medical negligence, such as the doctrine called “loss of chance,” can reflect evolving societal priorities. Loss of chance addresses the tension between unfair verdicts arising from jury confusion and the need to compensate plaintiffs who merely lost some probability of survival, or the chance of obtaining a better outcome, because of medical negligence. In this article, we will examine another legal doctrine of interest to physicians, res ipsa loquitur, which in Latin means “the thing speaks for itself.” Since this doctrine was applied to medical malpractice litigation, it has evolved in ways that will be relevant to clinical practice, and help mitigate medical malpractice risk.