Caring and the Law [Paperback]

'Caring and the Law' considers the law's response to caring. It explores how care is valued and recognised, how it is regulated and restricted and how the values of caring are reflected in the law. It does this by examining the law's interaction with caring in a wide range of fields including family, medical, welfare, criminal and tort law. At the heart of the book is the claim that the law has failed to recognise the importance of caring in many areas and in doing so has led to the costs and burdens of care falling on those who provide it, primarily women. It has also meant that the law has failed to protect those who receive care from the abuse that can take place in a caring context. The book promotes an ethic of care as providing an ethical and conceptual framework for the law to respond to caring relationships.This book considers the law's response to caring. It explores how care is valued and recognised, how it is regulated and restricted and how the values of caring are reflected in the law.Jonathan Herring is a Professor of Law at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College.

Although the laws and cases Herring discusses are from the United Kingdom, the book should have a broad philosophical and legal appeal to those interested in social justice and issues of care in other countries. The book reads as if it represents a lifetime of investigation into Anglo-American literature and British court cases on care and the law.

Graduate students and practitioners alike would find its stories, philosophy, and analysis informative and moving. Those who specialise in one area of law may fruitfully dip into a single chapter because Herring carries his thesis explicitly and clearly through each section of the book. This is a carefully reasoned and widely researched book that makes a passionate plea for embracing the wider moral and social significance of a relational understanding of care where all of us should hold one another, society, and the state respol“[