Care and the Mandate of Medical Law

Oxford Legal Philosophy | Oxford University Press | January 2027

The law of negligence is structured around the idea of care – yet there has been almost no sustained engagement between negligence law and the ethics of care. This absence is striking. If care lies at the heart of negligence doctrine, shouldn’t the philosophical tradition that has explored it most deeply inform our analysis?

On closer inspection, this absence reflects an underlying assumption shared by legal philosophers, private law scholars, and practitioners alike. On this view, the notion of ‘care’ invoked in negligence law is fundamentally distinct from the interpersonal moral notion of 'care' examined by care ethicists, such that any resemblance between the two is merely semantic.  

Care and the Mandate of Medical Law challenges that assumption. It argues that, despite their technical complexity, the questions that recur in clinical negligence cases are, at their core, enduring puzzles about our moral responsibilities to care. Has someone cared well enough? Or is it fitting to blame them? Far from being alien to ordinary life, these are the same questions that arise whenever we try – often messily, clumsily, and imperfectly – to care for one another. In this respect, the law mirrors our interpersonal moral responsibilities more closely than one might expect. The ethics of care, then, is not an external lens on negligence law; it is integral to understanding its internal logic.