An agent’s responsibility for action has critical importance in both criminal and civil law. In a liberal society that favors negative liberty, the law permits maximum liberty and autonomy only to responsible agents.1 Generally unencumbered by legal regulation, they are free, for example, to make foolish, irrational and even dangerous life choices, such as refusing potentially life-saving medic...

In Part I, the author explains that it is the adjudication between the conflicting claims of individual liberty, personal autonomy and self-determination versus the preservation of life as a societal value that is at the core of the issue posed by physician-assisted suicide. In Part II, author makes the case against suicide, noting that liberty is not absolute and the state retains powers of so...

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...

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...