Dr Cressida Auckland

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places and we cannot guarantee all students will get a place.

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 artificial wombs; 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 how existing health inequalities have been highlighted, and exacerbated, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the topics will be guided by current controversies, subjects for 2024-5 may include: autonomy and mental capacity; incapacity in adults; medical decision-making in the context of minors; claims for wrongful conception, life and birth; abortion; preimplantation genetic testing; assisted dying; health inequalities; patient choice and rights; and the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

20 hours of seminars in the AT.

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.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.