The Right to Life and the Value of Life: Orientations in Law, Politics and Ethics

This groundbreaking book is the first collection to investigate together the law, political science and ethical perspectives on the right and value of life. Its contributions are organized around five themes: (a) a theoretical positioning of life and death: (b) war, armed conflict and detention; (c) death as punishment; (d) medical parameters for ending life; and (e) medical policies for the preservation of life. The essays, written by an international roster of scholars, seek to engage with the evolution of the law, political discourse and philosophy on the right to life and the value of life in an attempt to understand its contemporary orientations within the selected multi-jurisdictional fora and interdisciplinary contexts. In studying this issue in its contemporary contexts of `right' and `value' the volume fills the current scholarly lacuna in the general subject of the orientations of life. Moreover, it holds broad appeal for scholars, researchers, and students occupied with issues of war; armed conflict, the death penalty, and various contemporary medico-legal scenarios, The Right to Life and the Value of Life presents a much-needed examination of key issues in a broad practical, and theoretical context.

To speak about law is always and necessarily to be engaged in a discourse about both justice and power. While law's relationship to justice is everywhere contingent and uncertain, law completely divorced from power is unthinkable. And, while law need not be virtuous to be law, if it had no effect in the world it could hardly be said to merit the name law. Recognizing these facts, the series on Law, Justice and Power takes a broad view of legal scholarship. It publishes books by social scientists, humanists and legal academics which connect an understanding of culture's normative ideals with examination of the complex ways that law works in the world, insist that justice is inseparable from social practices and analyze law as one form of power, one way of constituting, controlling and changing the social world. It focuses on state law as well as law in communities and cultural practices and on identities and their articulation in and through law, on law's power in the taken-for-granted world, on its role in the complex construction of nation and national power and on global developments which today destablize and transform the meaning and significance of law. The series invites innovative scholarship that crosses disciplinary as well as geographic and temporal boundaries

Jon Yorke, Reader in Law, BCU School of Law, Birmingham City University, UK