MSc Healthcare Ethics and Law (Intercalated)

The course is designed to introduce students studying on the Intercalated MSc in Healthcare Ethics and Law, who do not have a legal background, to some of the major authors and issues within the Anglo-American jurisprudential tradition, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and morality. The course will have two parts.  The first will concentrate on “analytic jurisprudence” – questions about what laws are by their nature, and whether there are any moral or conceptual limits on what a government can pass as a law.  It will also consider the concept of the “rule of law”, and its relationship to political power and legitimacy.  The second part will shift to “normative jurisprudence” – questions about what a decent legal system would look like in terms of concepts such as justice, rights, and liberty.

As well as being intellectually demanding in its own right, the course will provide students with a deeper understanding of some of the theoretical themes that are implicit in other modules in their degree, and will provide a rich theoretical seam that they can mine in the course of their dissertations. 

This course is to be offered to to students registered on the MSc Health Care Ethics and Law.  It is designed to introduce students to some of the major authors and issues within the Anglo-American jurisprudential tradition. We will begin by examining some theoretical questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the role of the courts – specifically Hartian positivism and responses to it from thinkers such as Fuller, Finnis, and Dworkin.  What is it that distinguishes legal rules from other kinds of rule, and reasoning from other kinds of practical reasoning?  What is the relationship between morality and the law, and the reasons we have to behave in accordance with either?  Can a legal system be so morally corrupt as no longer to count as a legal system in any meaningful sense at all?

In the later part of the course, we will consider what characteristics a just legal system would display; this normative aspect of the course will consider concepts such as social justice, rights – what they are, and who has them and why – and liberty.  The bridge between the two parts of the course will be provided by a consideration of the relationship between law and political legitimacy, with a particular emphasis on whether it matters that the judiciary appears to wield at least some legislative power.

The precise content of the second part of the course is deliberately broad in scope; though the general themes will be constant from year to year, the precise topics covered will be liable to change in response to matters of current controversy. Granted the degree programme on which students will be registered, the seminar questions will, where possible, be designed to be relevant to a healthcare ethics and law context. 
 

By the end of the course, students will be able to

• engage in and cultivate reasoned legal and philosophical arguments, by way of both written presentation and (in seminars) oral argument;  
• produce (by a specified deadline) concise and appropriately structured discursive essays addressing a key jurisprudential issue, with accurate and appropriate use of sources;
• undertake independent online and library-based research, and use that research to formulate theses and summarise legal and ethical perspectives;
• interpret others’ arguments, and to address their strongest and weakest points in a disinterested manner;
• put textual evidence to work in the independent development of arguments;
• think clearly, to identify and assess competing principles impartially, and to identify and solve legal and ethical problems;
• discuss such problems orally and to articulate relevant conclusions. 

PART A: Introduction to Analytic Jurisprudence

Week 1: Introduction to the Course

Positivism and Naturalism; Hobbes, the Leviathan, and the Origins of Legitimacy; the idea of the Rule of Law

Weeks 1-2: Hartian Positivism

Primary and Secondary Rules; the “Sources Thesis”; Obligation; Immoral Laws and The Hart/ Devlin Debate

Weeks 3-4: Responses to Positivism

Fuller and the “Internal Morality” of Law; Finnis and “New Natural Law”

Weeks 4-5: Adjudication, and “Law as Integrity”

PART B: Introduction to Normative Jurisprudence

Week 6: Utilitarianism and Liberalism

Weeks 7: Positive and Negative Liberty; The Nature of Legal Rights; The Moral Basis of Legal Rights; The Moral Extent of Legal Rights

Weeks 8-9: Rights and Justice – Nozick; Rights and Justice – Rawls; Equality in Law

Week 10: The Rule of Law Revisited; Courts and Democratic Government

Teaching for this course will be by means of a fairly traditional lecture/ workshop format, with themes and outline arguments introduced and explained in the lectures, and workshops in which students will be expected to develop their thinking in relation to those themes.  Questions for discussion in workshops will be circulated in advance, but the intention will be that they be fairly free-flowing: the questions will be spurs to discussion, rather than tasks to be discharged. 

HLA Hart, The Concept of Law

Nigel Simmonds, Central Issues in Jurisprudence

JS Mill, On Liberty

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously; Law’s Empire