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This article explores the debates that took place in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century on the legitimacy of courts to decide on questions relating to the practice of medicine. Though physicians and jurists had engaged with the issue of medical liability before these debates emerged, the latter constituted a momentum in those actors’ normative work on medical responsibility in the contemporary era. Based on an analysis of a corpus of texts published in the cases of Hélie and Thouret-Noroy, this article examines clashes around two central issues: was it appropriate to make physicians justiciable before common law courts? Was it possible to form a judgment adjusted to medical practices in a courtroom? Around these two questions, different ways of looking at medical responsibility or of approaching the boundaries of physicians’ irresponsibility before the courts emerged. Drawing on sociological analysis of the exercise of judgment, this article aims to provide a new contribution to the study of the relationships between medicine and justice, and to their transformations in the long term.