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.