ESELS Working Groups
Empirical Healthcare Law
Intro
This working group would combine legal doctrinal methods with empirical insights to contribute to the field of Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) in healthcare. Healthcare law covers fundamental issues such as consent, capacity, patient confidentiality, medical evidence, resource allocation and public health. However, there is often a gap between how legal frameworks are understood and the actual practice in clinics, courts and other institutions, including how medical evidence is assessed and how it shapes administrative and judicial decision-making. Empirical research provides an important means of examining this gap.
Our group would shed light on how legal obligations are translated into practice and on the factors that shape judicial decision-making in healthcare-related cases. We aim to produce a richer understanding of – how healthcare law operates across clinical, administrative and judicial settings. Through this integrated approach, the working group will strengthen dialogue between empirical and doctrinal legal scholarship and demonstrate the contribution that ELS can make to understanding and improving healthcare law and policy in Europe.
Objectives
The working group will establish a European network for researchers interested in empirical approaches to healthcare law and develop collaborative research around shared themes, including consent, capacity, medical evidence, decision-making, access to healthcare and social protection, patient rights and public health policy. Healthcare and social protection are particularly well suited to ELS in Europe because common legal and regulatory challenges are addressed through markedly different national healthcare, administrative and judicial institutions, creating opportunities to study how institutional differences shape decision-making and legal outcomes.
The group aims to (i) improve understanding of legal duties in practice and of the factors that shape decision-making in healthcare cases; (ii) use inter-disciplinary qualitative and quantitative methods to shed light on how the challenges in healthcare delivery in European states can be better met and (iii) improve normative legal analysis and inform law/policy reform. Our integrated approach will encourage dialogue between legal academics, lawyers, social scientists and healthcare professionals.
Group activities
Activities will include research presentations, methodological discussions, collaborative projects, comparative European research, conference panels and publications. We would welcome researchers at all career stages interested in healthcare law, health policy and empirical legal research.
Two strands
(1) Mental Health (Mental Capacity// Public Policy//in European Healthcare)
(2) Medical Evidence and Judicial Decision-Making in Healthcare and Social Protection
Chairs
Farrah Raza (farrah.raza@rhul.co.uk)
Szilvia Altwicker-Hámori (szilvia.altwicker-hamori@zhaw.ch)
Application form Empirical Healthcare Law