Care and the Mandate of Medical Law

The law of negligence is structured around the idea of care, yet legal scholarship on negligence has rarely engaged with the ethics of care. This absence is striking. If care lies at the heart of negligence doctrine, shouldn't the philosophical tradition that has explored it most deeply inform our analysis? On closer inspection, the silence reflects a shared assumption that the notion of 'care' invoked in the law is entirely distinct from the interpersonal, moral notion examined by care ethicists. Care and the Mandate of Medical Law challenges that assumption.

It brings care ethics and the law of negligence into sustained conversation for the first time to develop a philosophical account of the law of medical negligence. Through this, it offers a resolution to some of the most pressing challenges plaguing medical law today.

Despite their technical complexity, the questions recurring in clinical negligence cases are in fact enduring puzzles about our moral responsibilities to care - puzzles that care ethicists have long explored. Recognizing this has real consequences for how we understand the law of medical negligence. The law requires medical professionals to 'care adequately' for specific others, by avoiding certain concrete, recurring forms of care failure. Analysing the structure of these failures resolves an acute tension at the heart of medical law: when should courts defer to clinical expertise in determining breach, and when should they not? Some care failures turn on clinical judgement that courts are ill-placed to assess; others do not. This distinction, the book argues - not ad hoc decision-making - should determine when deference is ultimately owed. The ethics of care, then, is not an external lens on the law of negligence; it is integral to understanding its logic.