LL4EB      Half Unit
Key Issues in Medical Law and Ethics

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Medical law is a rapidly developing subject, as new technologies and treatments offer new possibilities for creating, extending, and enhancing life. Each week, we will interrogate a different key issue in medical law and ethics, considering issues such as how we ought to regulate innovations such as genome editing and the development of brain organoids; what the implications may be of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence in healthcare settings; how new treatments reinvigorate old debates around end-of-life decision-making or abortion; and the role of public inquiries in response to health scandals such as the Infected Blood Inquiry. While the topics will be guided by current controversies, subjects for 2025-6 may include: autonomy and mental capacity; incapacity in adults; medical decision-making in the context of minors; assisted dying in the context of psychiatric illness; late-term abortion; preimplantation genetic testing; how the law defines parenthood; the regulation of embryo models; the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare; and the Infected Blood Inquiry.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

One 2,000 word essay

A full reading list will be distributed during the course.  Some examples of texts covered on the course include:
• F. Freyenhagen and T O’Shea, ‘Hidden Substance: mental disorder as a challenge to normatively neutral accounts of autonomy’ (2013) 9(1) International Journal of Law in Context 53-70
• E. Jackson, 'From "doctor knows best" to dignity: Placing adults who lack capacity at the centre of decisions about their medical treatment' (2018) Modern Law Review 81(2), 247-281
• A. Buchanan, ‘Advance Directives and the Personal Identity Problem’ (1988) 17(4) Philosophy and Public Affairs 277
• C. Auckland and I. Goold. "Parental rights, best interests and significant harms: who should have the final say over a child's medical care?." The Cambridge Law Journal (2019): 1-37.
• U. Schuklenk & S. Van de Vathorst, ‘Treatment-resistant major depressive disorder and assisted dying’ (2015) 41 Journal of Medical Ethics 577-583.
• S. McGuinness, ‘Law, Reproduction, and Disability: Fatally ‘Handicapped’? (2013) Medical Law Review 21(2) 213–242.
• J. Savulescu, ‘Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children’ (2001) 15 Bioethics 413
• M. Marmot et al, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On (The Health Foundation, 2020).
 

Those who have not studied medical law might find it helpful to read E. Jackson, Medical Law: Text, Cases and Materials, 6th edition (Oxford UP, 2022) as an introductory text.

Written test (100%)

This assessment will be held under exam conditions and will take place in the January exam period.