Territory, values, and health law in a devolved UK: examining the role of the gift in opt-out organ donation

Harrington, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0957-3334, Watkins, Matthew, Reed-Berendt, Ruby and Farrell, Anne-Maree 2025. Territory, values, and health law in a devolved UK: examining the role of the gift in opt-out organ donation. Journal of Law and Society Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Devolution since 1998 has seen administrations in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales gain distinct powers over a range of policy fields, with health prominent among them. This poses two pressing questions for socio-legal scholarship which we address in this paper. To what extent are changing territorial arrangements significant for the substance of UK health law and the values by which it is oriented? And what role is played by devolved health law in re-defining territories and values within the UK? Informed by perspectives from geography and policy studies, and drawing on our own qualitative empirical research we examine recent law-making processes in relation to organ donation reform. ‘Opt-out’, or ‘presumed consent’, schemes, adopted in sequence in each of the UK countries, appear to challenge the centrality of voluntary altruism, extolled as a fundamentally British value in Richard Titmuss’s post-war work on social policy. Our findings confirm that there has been a re-territorialization of values under devolution, with greater emphasis on sub-state identities. But they also indicate the persistence of a common space of policy-learning across the UK and an enduring concern with altruism in this area.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Law
ISSN:	0306-3704
Funders:	British Academy/Leverhulme
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 September 2025
Date of Acceptance:	5 September 2025
Last Modified:	09 Sep 2025 09:01
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180948

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