Main description:

Health and health care are vitally important to all of us, and academic interest in the law regulating health has, over the last 50 years, become an important field of academic study. An analysis of the development of, changes in, and scope of Health Law and Ethics to date, is both timely and of interest to students and scholars alike, along with an exploration of its likely future development. This work brings together contributions from leading and emerging scholars in the field. Each contributor has been invited to select and analyse a 'leading work', which has for them shed light on the way that Health Law and Ethics has developed. The chapters are both autobiographical, reflecting upon the works that have proved significant to contributors, and also critical analyses of the current state of the field. This collection also includes a specially written Introduction and Conclusion, which critically reflect upon the development of Health Law and Ethics and its likely future developments in the light of the reflections by contributors on their chosen leading works. The book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers in Health Law and Ethics, as it provides critical discussions and assessments of some of the leading scholarship in the field.

Contents:

1 Introduction; 2 Altruism, markets and the importance of the social contract in healthcare: Richard Titmuss's The Gift Relationship; 3 Principled effects: The importance of Beauchamp and Childress' Principles of Biomedical Ethics; 4 The realisation of human rights in mental health law: Larry Gostin's 'The ideology of entitlement: The application of contemporary legal approaches to psychiatry'; 5 'Master of medical law'? Peter Skegg's Law, Ethics, and Medicine and the denial of life-prolonging treatment; 6 The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology (1984); 7 Identifying the disease but not the cure: Ian Kennedy's 'What is a medical decision?'; 8 Taking the long view: David Rothman's Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making; 9 How to control disease transmission: Brazier and Harris's 'Public health and private lives'; 10 The importance of listening to patients: Sarah Franklin's Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception; 11 Integrating feminisms' perspectives into the legal curriculum: Feminist Perspectives on Health Care Law; 12 Emily Jackson, Regulating Reproduction: Law, Technology and Autonomy; 13 Disclosing genetic information within families and beyond: Graeme Laurie's Genetic Privacy: A Challenge to Medico-Legal Norms; 14 Setting a research agenda for mental capacity law: Mary Donnelly's Healthcare Decision-Making and the Law; 15 Thinking carefully about organ donation: Janet Radcliffe-Richards's The Ethics of Transplants: Why Careless Thought Costs Lives; 16 Cohering the normative and the empirical: Jonathan Ives's 'A method of reflexive balancing in a pragmatic, interdisciplinary and reflexive bioethics'; 17 Learning lessons about how to learn from mistakes: Errors, Medicine and the Law; 18 Reflections on these leading works