Identity, Personhood and the Law book pdf download

Author: Jonathan Herring

About the Author: studied law at Hertford College, Oxford University before training as a solicitor. I did the BCL at Oxford and taught at Oxford and Cambridge, before taking up my fellowship at Exeter. Outside work I love spending time with my partner and children, who are very funny. I also enjoy running, novels and foreign language films. He research how the law relates with the things that matter most to us. Our family, our friends, our bodies. My writing questions the assumption that we are capable, independent, self-sufficient, autonomous people who need legal rights to protect us from invasion from others. Instead, I believe we are profoundly vulnerable and interdependent. We need a law which enriches and protects our relationships, rather than one that promotes individual rights. Applying this kind of thinking I have written on a wide range of issues including caring; vulnerable adults; older people; children’s rights; marriage; ownership of body parts; pregnancy; rape; and disability. He love teaching. At Exeter I teach Criminal Law, Family Law and Medical Law and Ethics for the BA degree in Jurisprudence.

Identity, Personhood and the Law book pdf download By Jonathan Herring

This book is an examination of how the law understands human identity and the whole notion of ‘human being’. On these two notions the law, usually unconsciously, builds the superstructure of ‘human rights’. It explores how the law understands the concept of a human being, and hence a person who is entitled to human rights. This involves a discussion of the legal treatment of those of so-called “marginal personhood” (e.g. high functioning non-human animals; humans of limited intellectual capacity, and fetuses). It also considers how we understand our identity as people, and hence how we fall into different legal categories: such as gender, religion and so on.The law makes a number of huge assumptions about some fundamental issues of human identity and authenticity – for instance that we can talk meaningfully about the entity that we call ‘our self’. Until now it has rarely, if ever, identified those assumptions, let alone interrogated them. This failure has led to the law being philosophically dubious and sometimes demonstrably unfit for purpose. Its failure is increasingly hard to cover up. What should happen legally, for instance, when a disease such as dementia eliminates or radically transforms all the characteristics that most people regard as foundational to the ‘self’? This book seeks to plug these gaps in the literature.

Download PDF of Identity, Personhood and the Law book pdf download By Jonathan Herring
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