Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme has often spoken about the importance of ‘legacy’ in academic work and has forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genetic privacy, human tissue and information governance, and the regulatory salience of the concept of liminality. The chapters in this volume animate the concept of legacy as a lens of analysis for the study and practice of medical jurisprudence. In this light, legacy reveals characteristics of both benefit and burden, as both a facilitator of and an encumbrance to the development of law, policy and regulation. Overall, the contributions reconcile the ideas of legacy and responsiveness and show that both dimensions are critical to achieve and sustain the health of medical jurisprudence itself as a dynamic, interdisciplinary and policy-engaged field of thinking.

Taking a lead from Graeme Laurie’s willingness to ‘think outside the box’ – typified by his more recent work on ‘liminality’ – this chapter has as its thrust the idea that medical jurisprudence needs to speak to more than the leading cases and the nice doctrinal questions. It also needs to get the regulatory environment right for the upcoming technological developments – in genetics, robotics, additive manufacturing, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence,, machine learning etc. – that promise to transform medical practice. Following this line of argument, medical lawyers should think outside the box of Law 1.0, where traditional legal principles, concepts and precedents are applied to new technologies and novel applications; engage with the regulatory challenges, including the challenges of regulatory connection and effectiveness but particularly that of regulatory legitimacy, that are the subject of Law 2.0 thinking; and join the embryonic Law 3.0 conversation, which contemplates not only smart technological solutions to regulatory problems but also humans being taken out of the loop (as both regulators and regulatees).

This chapter considers the meaning and role of interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching in medical law and ethics, itself an inherently interdisciplinary field. It notes that formidable challenges persist, however, especially when navigating methodological and conceptual differences across disciplines, and operating outwith a disciplinary ‘home’. The chapter looks at how complementary strands of diverse specialisms can come together to create the constellation of critical tools needed to address contemporary legal, regulatory and ethical challenges in medicine, health care and the biosciences. In the three case studies, the authors examine the contribution of multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to pedagogy, critical scholarship and the production of practical research outputs, and how these have informed and influenced their own work, with and alongside that of Graeme Laurie. Throughout, the discussions highlight the myriad ways that his research and teaching exemplify the openness of spirit and the intellectual curiosity required to engage meaningfully in interdisciplinarity.

In his classic work Just Healthcare, Norman Daniels speaks about the role of healthcare institutions in supporting fair equality of opportunity: such institutions seek to prevent, restore, and compensate for loss of “normal species functioning.” Daniels understands “normal species functioning” as functioning without disease. He assumes that individuals whose normal functioning cannot be restored are outside the normal opportunity range and have severe physical or mental disabilities. Healthcare institutions that provide supportive care to these individuals fall outside the bounds of justice.