Jacqueline Laing

Jacqueline Laing is a legal philosopher and academic, specializing in jurisprudence, or the philosophy of law, criminal law and applied ethics. She has taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Hughes Hall, Cambridge, King's College, London, St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Melbourne University. She is a barrister of the High Court of Australia and a solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales.

Born in Scotland and educated in Calcutta, India, and Canberra, Australia, she took degrees in philosophy and law at the Australian National University, clerked to a judge in Canberra and won a Commonwealth scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where she undertook a doctorate on the concept of intention in the law of homicide under the direction of John Finnis.

Laing’s interests lie in the field of jurisprudence and applied ethics. Commenting on contemporary moral conundrums she applies natural law thinking to questions about the family, life and death, and the limits of legal regulation. On the subject of voluntary euthanasia she argues that institutionalizing medically assisted death erodes respect for human life, endangers the vulnerable and disabled, underestimates human capacity for error and vice and is intrinsically discriminatory. She argues that it plays into the hands of illicit interests and trades on an improper understanding of human autonomy. She warns against dismissing "the army of corporate, financial, medical and political interests that there are in controlling death, euthanasia’s corrosive effects on public and professional attitudes, and the discrimination implicit in its implementation." Of the vested interests that there are in controlling death she says:

...
Wikipedia