Professor Charles Foster

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, a member of the Oxford Law Faculty, and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Oxford Institute and the Ethox Centre, and an Associate at the Oxford Human Rights Hub. He is also a practising barrister, specializing in medical law, and a part time judge of the Crown Court (where he is authorized to try serious sexual offences) and the County Court.

His PhD is from the University of Cambridge for work on the way that the law handles human autonomy and dignity in medical decision-making.

His research is a search for a satisfactory legal anthropology. It arises from a concern that we make decisions crucially affecting human welfare without having any real idea what sort of creatures we are. In the search for answers that do real legal work he takes cross-bearings from many perspectives and disciplines, including biology (he is particularly concerned with the moral status of non-human animals and what that status can tell us about our own status), moral philosophy, epistemology, neuroethics, and theology. He has concentrated his search in the field of medical law and ethics, and has written extensively about issues such as identity and personhood, the importance and limitation of the principle of autonomy, the meaning and use of the notion of human dignity, and the use of intuitions in moral and legal reasoning.

At the Bar he has been involved in some of the key cases in medical law. There is a list of publications at https://charlesfoster.co.uk His Faculty webpage is https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/charles-foster