Birmingham Law School hosted the Ethical Judgments Project Workshop on 15 September 2014. The workshop is part of the Ethical Judgments Project (EJP) which involves 30 academics from the UK, US and Canada. The purpose of the EJP is to consider an alternate world where decisions made by UK courts are required to be ethically valid to the same extent that they are required to be legally valid. The project looks at nine important medical law cases in the UK on topics like abortion, IVF, medical negligence, consent to treatment, withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and assisted dying.

The workshop brought together participants in the project to discuss the ethical judgments which had been written. Two judgments were written and presented by leading academics in the field. These judgments were then subject to commentary from both an ethical and a legal perspective. The project provided an opportunity for the writers of the judgments and the commentators to discuss the cases in depth as well as receiving feedback from the project members as a whole on the cases.

The Ethical Judgments Project will be published as an edited collection by Hart Publishing in 2016. The workshop was funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust. Three of the members of the Management Group of the EJP are academics at the Birmingham Law School and all three (Clark Hobson, Dr Sheelagh McGuinness, and Dr Stephen Smith) are members of the Centre of Health Law, Science and Policy. The Management Group for the EJP also includes colleagues at Bristol University, Leicester University, Southampton University and the University of Strathclyde.