The article seeks to show that the liberal idea of securing an equal liberty for all must be reexamined in the two sets of discussions around the sought-for balance between liberty and equality, so as to avoid the separation both of liberty and equality and of the domains opposing formal and substantive claims. These must be rather regarded in their correlated conditions, required for an effect...

Fortunately the momentum to ensure that a person’s right to involvement in research is upheld has just gone up a gear. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (MCA DOLS), which is a supplement to the main MCA Code of Practice (2007), has just passed through parliament. A whole variety of regulations, training and practice implications will follow for anyone who may have t...

Although Foucault can be rightly seen as one of the most influential thinkers of our times, his ideas have hardly been straightforwardly accepted. His vision of law in the modern era, in particular, has drawn some severe criticism. Scholar as diverse as Habermas and Poulantzas have expressed strong doubts with regards to Foucault’s approach to law, accusing him of downplaying the role of the le...

Public health policies which involve active intervention to improve the health of the population are often criticised as paternalistic. This paper argues that it is a mistake to frame our discussions of public health policies in terms of paternalism. First, it is deeply problematic to pick out which policies should count as paternalistic; at best we can talk about paternalistic justifications f...

Balancing the competing demands of security and liberty is commonly said to be the central task of anti-terrorism policy. This Essay begins by distinguishing between the two ways in which the notion of balance is presented—the trade-off thesis and the image of a set of scales—and argues that each is flawed as an analytical aid. The Essay then proceeds to show further limitations of the balancin...

On June 26, 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2 unanimous decisions that there is no constitutionally protected right to assisted suicide. Overturning 2 1996 Federal Appeals Court rulings that had struck down Washington and New York state laws prohibiting assisted suicide, the Supreme Court rejected 2 key arguments. First, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the right to liberty guar...

This is a tutorial article based on a lecture delivered in June 1999 at the NATO Advanced Study Institute in Ankara. The phenomenon of Andreev reflection is introduced as the electronic analogue of optical phase-conjugation. In the optical problem, a disordered medium backed by a phase-conjugating mirror can become completely transparent. Yet, a disordered metal connected to a superconductor ha...