Research Handbook On Socio Legal Studies Of Medicine And Health

This timely Research Handbook offers significant insights into an understudied subject, bringing together a broad range of socio-legal studies of medicine to help answer complex and interdisciplinary questions about global health – a major challenge of our time.

Herbert M. Kritzer is the Marvin J. Sonosky Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School. --Book Jacket.

The study of law and social movements provides an ideal lens for rethinking fundamental questions about the relationship between law and power. This Research Handbook takes up that challenge, framing a new, more global, dynamic, reflexive, and contextualised phase of social movement studies.

This unique Research Handbook maps the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, exploring the rich and complex nature of this area of research. It argues that sociology of law flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies and research fields.

The Research Handbook on International Abortion Law provides an in-depth, multidisciplinary study of abortion law around the world, presenting a snapshot of global policies during a time of radical change. With leading scholars from every continent, Mary Ziegler illuminates key forces that shaped the past and will influence an unpredictable future.

The effect of Globalization on health has attracted the attention of scholars and policy makers across multiple disciplines. A key concern is the regulation of international health protection, and in particular the use of international health instruments and the complex interaction between international law and health considerations. For the first time, a group of law and policy scholars have analysed these issues, drawing on knowledge from their respective fields. The resulting book provides comprehensive coverage of contemporary issues in global health law and governance.

A series of recent high-profile court cases has demonstrated the inadequacy of current laws in addressing issues relating to medical treatment decisions involving seriously ill children. The challenges of determining that life-sustaining medical treatment is not in a young child’s best interests have resulted in criticism of the best interests principle. This book explores the theoretical foundations of the best interests principle, and alternatives offered in the academic literature, to allow readers to understand why the principle remains contentious despite its prevalence. It provides theoretical background, exploration of what occurs in practice, and proposes a novel approach to address these challenges. Frameworks for decision-making identified in the academic literature are used to examine the application of the best interests principle in practice in England and Wales, Australia, and New Zealand through a review of the case law and qualitative research with paediatric doctors. The exploration of current practice allows readers to understand the challenges of applying the best interests principle, but also the need to retain a focus on the child. Readers are introduced to a human-rights based approach, which ensures that the focus remains on upholding the child’s best interests but also provides a more comprehensive explanation of the situation. Progressing the debate around end-of-life decision-making and children, the book will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers. It will also provide practical guidance to both legal and medical practitioners in managing disputes about the provision of life-sustaining treatment.

Since its foundation as an academic field in the 1990s, critical race theory has developed enormously and has, among others, been supplemented by and (dis)integrated with critical whiteness studies. At the same time, the field has moved beyond its origins in Anglo-Saxon environments, to be taken up and re-developed in various parts of the world – leading to not only new empirical material but also new theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches. Gathering these new and global perspectives, this book presents a much-needed collection of the various forms, sophisticated theoretical developments and nuanced analyses that the field of critical race and whiteness theories and studies offers today. Organized around the themes of emotions, technologies, consumption, institutions, crisis, identities and on the margin, this presentation of critical race and whiteness theories and studies in its true interdisciplinary and international form provides the latest empirical and theoretical research, as well as new analytical approaches. Illustrating the strength of the field and embodying its future research directions, The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race and whiteness.