SIBLE @ Twilight
Truth and ConSequences: Implications of Ubiquitous DNA Sequencing
Guest Lecture by Professor Robert Cook-Deegan, Duke University, USA
18 October 2012
5:00pm -6:00pm followed by a drinks reception
Richard Roberts Building, Pool Lecture Theatre
This lecture is free and everyone is welcome to attend. Find out more
The HFEA consultation on mitochondria replacement for reproductive purposes
Guest Seminar by Dr Allan Pacey, Department of Human Metabolism, University of Sheffield
31 October 2012
16:00-17:00
Room BB16, School of Law, Bartolome House
This seminar is free and everyone is welcome to attend.
Abortion and Human Rights in Europe
Guest Lecture by our new SIBLE member Dr Dimitrios Tsarapatansis
28 November 2012
16:00-17:00
Moot Court, School of Law, Bartolome House
Bioethics and Human Rights: Can They Learn From Each Other?
Guest seminar by Dr Alasdair Cochrane, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield
6 March 2013
16:00-17:00
Moot Court, School of Law, Bartolome House
This seminar is free and everyone is welcome to attend.
Abstract
In recent years there has been growing scholarly interest in the relationship between bioethics and human rights. The majority of this work has focused on whether the institutional and normative frameworks of human rights can be usefully applied to those bioethical controversies that have a global reach: drug trials, access to healthcare, genetic modification, and so on. This paper, however, switches the debate around. For it suggests that some of the key concerns in bioethics – in particular, the just distribution of medical resources and controversies about the moral status and definition of the ‘human’ – have radical implications for the practice and very idea of human rights.
POSTPONED Faithful judgements: the role of religion in laypeople's ethical evaluations of new reproductive and genetic technologies
Guest Seminar by Professor Jackie Leach Scully, Professor of Social Ethics & Bioethics, University of Newcastle
Abstract
There is growing academic interest in the processes and practices of non-professional or ‘lay’ bioethics – whether that means public bioethical debates that may influence policy, or an individual’s decisions about biomedical technologies. Following on from an earlier project that used empirical qualitative methods to look at the processes of bioethical evaluation by groups of lay people, this ESRC-funded study focuses on members of faith groups and their thinking about new reproductive and genetic technologies (NRGTs). Using dialogue groups and interviews, we are exploring the ways in which issues of faith, practice and faith group membership interweave with national healthcare policy, official faith group teaching, and individual wishes as people evaluate NRGTs, and decide whether and how to use them. In this seminar I will give an overview of our methodology, first results and preliminary analysis.
Tax, Quacks and Bureaucratic Law Making
Guest Seminar by Professor Chantal Stebbings, University of Exeter. This seminar is a joint seminar with the Institute of Commercial Law Studies
24 April 2013
16:00-17:00
Moot Court, School of Law Bartolome House
Abstract
Within the English legal system, the law expressed in Parliament’s statutes has the highest status, the role of the judiciary being merely to interpret it. In practice, however, the interpretation of legislation for use in a practical and day to day context was historically very often in the hands of civil servants, and nowhere more so than in the field of tax law. Statutory interpretation by tax officials involved a dynamic intersection of formal legislation, a framework of bureaucratic application and the demands of the taxpayers’ field of activity. The nature of this process, and the problems of authority which emerged from it, are clearly illustrated by the administration of the medicine stamp duty in nineteenth century England. The tax was introduced in 1783 primarily to raise urgently needed public revenue, but with an ancillary regulatory objective to control an extensive and undesirable trade in quack medicines. It was abolished only in 1941. The medicine stamp duty legislation was financially and legally chaotic. It was entirely controlled in its implementation by the revenue boards and became dominated by their informal practice. It was the Stamp Commissioners, later the Inland Revenue Commissioners, and their officers who decided whether a product was a medicine to be taxed or not. Their decisions were potentially inconsistent, sometimes chemically and medically flawed, and yet endured until overturned by the courts. This paper explores the reasons for, and the process of, statutory interpretation by civil servants in the context of this particular tax. It assesses how far pragmatic imperatives led to a practice of taxation by administrative act that was constitutionally unsound, threatened the integrity of the authority of the law, and which resulted in a body of law directly applicable to chemists and druggists and yet vague and essentially inaccessible to them.
The Implications of the ENCODE Project
Guest Seminar by Professor Stuart Wilson, Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, University of Sheffield.
1 May 2013
17:15-18:15
Moot Court, School of Law, Bartolome House
This seminar is free and everyone is welcome to attend.