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The Medical Law Review is established as an authoritative source of reference for academics, lawyers, legal and medical practitioners, law students, and anyone interested in healthcare and the law.

The Review presents articles of international interest which provide thorough analyses and comment on the wide range of topical issues that are fundamental to this expanding area of law. In addition, commentary sections provide in depth explorations of topical aspects in the field.

NEW SPECIAL ISSUE - PUBLISHED NOW

This special issue brings together a selection of articles that critically assess the concepts of ‘proper medical treatment’ and ‘conscience’ and the interplay between them. They contribute to a growing and important body of literature which assesses medical professionals’ attitudes towards particular medical practices. Particularly controversial practices, such as abortion and end of life decision-making, are often viewed as challenging the boundaries of proper medical practice. Indeed, it is often in these areas that claims of conscience come to the fore. Conscientious provision is sometimes used to describe the provision of treatments whose legality is ambiguous, while conscientious refusal is often claimed as a protection for refusal to provide treatments whose legality is clear. The articles in this special issue use these sites of controversy as a way of igniting analysis and drawing the themes in the issue together. They consider medical practice in relation to abortion, and consider how conscience and the concept of proper medical treatment can and should operate more broadly and in other areas of health care. The articles advance understandings of how particular practices come to be accepted and others remain at the margins, and challenge and expand on the role and function of conscience within proper medical treatment.