Suzanne Ost

• PhD
• Lancaster University

To date, little analysis exists of the criminal process's roles as a regulator of medical practice and as an arbiter of bioethics, nor whether criminal law is an appropriate forum for judging ethical medical dilemmas. The conscription of criminal law into moral controversy and the (perceived) rise in criminal investigations of medical errors sets t...

In this article, I argue that sexual exploitation in the doctor–patient relationship would be dealt with more appropriately by the law in England and Wales on the basis of a breach of fiduciary duty. Three different types of sexual boundary breaches are discussed, and the particular focus is on breaches where the patient's consent is obtained throu...

This paper considers the unexplored question of whether unaware crime victims have rights or interests in knowing and not knowing information pertaining to the crime(s) committed against them. Our specific focus is on whether crimes regarding abusive images should be disclosed to the now-adult victims of child sexual abuse who feature in them. Beca...

This article presents the novel conceptualization of the unknowing victim (UV) and addresses the ethical ramifications of this status. Criminology and victimology have primarily focused on knowing victims, but certain crimes occur without the victim’s detection (e.g. sexual assault of an unconscious victim). There is a critical liminal dimension to...

This article explores the situation in which a victim who has been identified during a criminal justice investigation is unaware of the crime committed against them. We argue that unknowing victims possess a unique vulnerability because discovering their victim status is highly likely to have harmful effects. Where law enforcement officers (LEOs) r...

We are very aware as we write this Editorial that we walk in the footsteps of giants, as we were when we took over as Editors of the Medical Law Review. The previous Editors, titans in the field of medical law, gave us very big shoes to fill, and the challenge was more than a little daunting. Individually, the experiences that led us to Editorship...

This chapter explores the position of medical professionals, primarily doctors, in criminal law. In certain respects, doctors appear to have an unusually privileged position under English criminal law. However, doctors are also particularly exposed to the risk of very serious criminal liability, such as in respect of gross negligence manslaughter....

In the wake of two recent high-profile, controversial cases involving the prosecution and conviction of Drs Bramhall and Bawa-Garba, this article considers when it is socially desirable to criminalise doctors’ behaviour, exploring how the matters of harm, public wrongs and the public interest can play out to justify—or not, as the case may be—the c...

John Kenyon Mason (19 December 1919-26 January 2017), CBE, MD, LLD, FRCPath, DMJ, FRCPE, FRSE, and known as Ken Mason to us all, was Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1973-1985 and thereafter Emeritus Professor of Forensic Medicine and Honorary Fellow in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh. A for...

The age of consent in England is 16. Except it is not always. It is ordinarily the age of 16 but since 2000, there has been a higher age of consent (18) for certain sexual activities. Originally this was where there was thought to be a position of trust (Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000), but it then was extended to other forms of exploitation,...

This paper sets out the distinctive harm caused and wrong done to child pornography victims. It presents a paradigm of reparation within a restorative justice framework that explains the significance of material reparation for these victims. The paper demonstrates that because of the particular nature of child pornography offences and the harms and...

The status that is and should be afforded to decisions made by those under 18 has been much debated, particularly in the context of health care. Ideas of rights, autonomy and the concept of best interests have been explored, and there appears to be an underlying concern that if minors are recognised as 'fully' autonomous individuals with legally en...

Researchers who involve children in their research are faced with the challenge of choosing between differing theoretical approaches which can prioritise children’s autonomy rights or their ‘vulnerability’ and their need to be protected. Somewhat confusingly, ethical guidelines seem to reflect a combination of these approaches. Even when researcher...

No law in any jurisdiction that permits physician assisted dying offers individuals a medically assisted death without the need to comply with certain criteria. The Netherlands is no exception. There is evidence to suggest that physicians are averse to providing an assisted death even when the Dutch ‘due care criteria’ have been met and the unbeara...

Two matters that have a significant presence in the contemporary Dutch assisted dying debate, are the nature of the suffering required for an assisted death to be lawful, and the issue of who can lawfully assist. This article explores whether the lawful medical assisted dying model is too restrictive in failing to recognise existential suffering, c...

2010 has been an eventful year in the life of the debate about assisted dying. In February, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) issued guidelines outlining the public policy factors that should be considered when determining whether to prosecute a person for assisting the suicide of another. In the same month, the Suicide Act 1961 was amended...

Although assisted dying has been most commonly presented within a medicalised framework, the notion of de-medicalisation is employed in this paper to suggest that there are emerging models of assisted dying in which some medical aspects assumed to be an integral part of the phenomenon are both challenged and diminished. The paper considers cases wh...

Xenotransplantation is an example of a developing biotechnology which highlights three differing interests in the health of the public; a specific interest in enhancing the health of individuals who require a particular procedure or treatment, a wider interest in protecting the health of us all by avoiding introducing biotechnologies which risk the...

This paper addresses the criminalisation of fabricated images of child pornography. Focusing on the new offence of possessing ‘non-photographic pornographic images of children’ (NPPIC) under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, it assesses whether harm- and morality-based arguments legitimate the extension of the criminal law to this activity. I cont...

Most codes of ethics governing professional client relations expressly forbid or strongly adviseagainst … sexual relations. Is this so because such relations are outside theproper scope of a professional relationship or because they cannot, within such a relationship, befully consensual? Introduction This essay offers the beginnings of an explorati...

Whilst health care professionals and scientists have been subject to civil law and professional regulation for some time, in England and Wales at least, questions of medical and scientific malpractice and cases involving bioethical dilemmas are increasingly coming before the criminal courts. This growing trend seems to have proceeded in the absence...

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethica...

In this paper we argue that while individual private interests such as autonomy and the need for a medical procedure or treatment are important in the provision and delivery of health care and the utilization of biotechnologies, these concepts need to be balanced with other interests such that in certain situations they do not take priority. We use...

This chapter addresses the question of whether the defence of necessity could and should be utilised in cases of euthanasia in the medical context. It challenges the application of the doctrine of double effect as a means of ascertaining the physician's primary intent and argues instead that the law should recognise that the physician faces a situa...

Child pornography and sexual grooming provide case study exemplars of problems that society and law have sought to tackle to avoid both actual and potential harm to children. Yet despite the considerable legal, political and societal concern that these critical phenomena attract, they have not, thus far, been subjected to detailed socio-legal and t...

This chapter addresses the wider picture of law's increased intervention in health care, before focusing upon the greater involvement of the criminal law in the medical arena and placing the criminalization of medical practice within a wider social and cultural context. The trend to prosecute in the medical arena is pervasive, and has undoubtedly h...

This book analyses how the criminal justice system regulates health care practice, and to what extent it can and should be used as a tool to resolve ethical conflict in health care. For most of the 20th century, the criminal courts were engaged in matters relating to medicine principally as a forum to resolve ethical controversies over the sanctity...

This paper addresses questions of legal and political theory concerning the representations of law, sovereign power and justice within Hamlet. I explore how the play can be seen to emphasise the significance of the restraints that can be placed upon the sovereign and Hamlet himself, by natural law and justice. Applying the natural law theories of S...

This article reviews newly declassified US intelligence files and other sources, including relevant trial documents, related to the Nazi killing of mentally and physically sick individuals deemed to be of little further use to society. It both supplements and revises existing work on the so-called 'Euthanasia' programme at the Kaufbeuren psychiatri...

In recent years, there has been increased societal concern regarding the dangers posed to children by sexual abuse and other related acts. For the main part, this article examines the new offence of meeting a child following sexual grooming under Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. I will address the question of whether the introduction of...

In (2004) 4 Rutgers Journal of Law & Religion: https://lawandreligion.com/sites/law-religion/files/War-Crimes-Salter-Ost.pdf

This article examines legal and social discourses surrounding the phenomenon of child pornography, considering the legal responses to child pornography (particularly when an individual is found to be in possession of such material), and the way in which such material, the child, and the possessor of child pornography are socially constructed. The a...

This paper argues that in medical discourse, there is insufficient unanimity of opinion with regards to the time at which an accurate diagnosis of PVS can be made and that clearly, there is an incomplete medical knowledge of the PVS condition. The judiciary chooses neither to question medical opinion that patients can be considered to be in PVS des...

With the much publicised not guilty verdict in the UK case of R v Moor last year, the phenomenon of euthanasia continues to rear its controversial head in today's society. It is a phenomenon that has tested the boundaries of the law in many different jurisdictions and is the subject of much worldwide debate. An essential part of the euthanasia deba...