An event from HEAL: What is Medical Law 'For'?

Jonathan will be speaking on ‘What is Medical Law ‘For’?

Should Health Care Law seek to resolve issues of bioethics or merely regulate the ways in which they are addressed? Does it matter that conflicting ethical advice can be said to leave patients' rights unprotected (Miola, J., ‘Medical law and medical ethics – complementary or corrosive?’ (2004) 6 Medical Law International 251-274)? Is Health Care Law doomed to develop into a value-neutral subset of consumer law (Brazier, M. and Glover, N., ‘Does Medical Law have a Future’ in Hayton, D. (ed) Law’s Futures, (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2000) 371-388)? This paper considers whether it is acceptable for health care lawyers to accept that there may be ‘no right answer’, or whether any theory of Health Care Law that accommodates indeterminacy represents a betrayal of the rule of law. It develops arguments explored in Montgomery, J., ‘The Legitimacy of Medical Law’ In McLean, S. (ed) First do no harm: Law, ethics and healthcare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1-16, and Montgomery, J. ‘Law and the demoralisation of medicine’ (2006) 26 Legal Studies 185-210, in order to address some of the challenges identified in those papers. It considers whether an analogy with judicial adjudication might be instructive.