Revisiting Landmark Cases in Medical Law

Drawing on legal developments in the UK, US, and other jurisdictions, this book revisits a selection of leading cases in medical law, and argues that while the judgments in each came to the correct conclusion, many issues were left unaddressed, and have led to avoidable confusion.

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Is it lawful for a doctor to give a patient life-shortening pain relief? Can treatment be lawfully provided to a child under 16 on the basis of her consent alone? Is it lawful to remove food and water provided by tube to a patient in a vegetative state? Is a woman’s refusal of a caesarean section recommended for the benefit of the fetus legally decisive? These questions were central to the four focal cases revisited in this book.

This book revisits nine landmark cases. For each, a new leading judgment is attributed to an imagined judge, Athena, who operates within the constraints of the legal system of England and Wales. Her judgments accord with an innovative legal theory, referred to as ‘modified law as integrity’, and are linked as a line of precedent. The result is a re-spinning of extant judicial threads into a web of legal principles with a greater claim to coherence and defensibility than those in the original cases.

The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of medical law, criminal law, bioethics, legal theory and moral philosophy.