Course description

The MA in Healthcare Ethics and Law will provide you with expert knowledge and understanding of ethical and medico-legal theories, and the skills needed to apply them to real-world scenarios in a diverse range of contexts.

You will study a wide variety of ethical and legal subjects including autonomy, consent, refusal of treatment, confidentiality, the moral status of the foetus, resource allocation, genetic testing, HIV testing, medical malpractice, clinical negligence, organ and tissue transplantation, fertility treatment, genetic manipulation, research ethics, stem cell research and euthanasia.

Aims

The MA in Healthcare Ethics and Law covers a wide variety of ethical and legal subject matter in order to allow students to apply their theory to real-world scenarios.

Teaching and learning

Teaching tends to defy the traditional boundaries associated with lectures and seminars. Generally, each class in a course unit has a duration of 2 or 3 hours per week, and is split roughly equally between a formal, didactic period and a structured discussion period (most often based on the so-called challenge-response model). Nevertheless, each class is considered a seminar or lecture, and attendance of all classes of a course unit for which a student is enrolled is thus compulsory. For course units of 15 credit value there will generally be 15 hours of face-to-face teaching throughout the semester in which the unit is delivered, and twice that amount for 30 credit units.

Coursework and assessment

Assessment of all taught course units (to a total of 120 credits) is by assessed coursework in the form of essays of 4,000 words per 15 credit course unit and up to 6,000 words for the two 30 credit core course units.  In addition, students who wish to complete the MA must submit a 12,000 to 15,000 word dissertation by independent research (60 credits); no dissertation is required for the PGDip or PGCert.  Part-time students undertake a supervised dissertation in the summer months of year two. Please note that the part-time students can extend their registration for extra 3 months to submit their dissertations in December of their second year, instead of September (you will be advised of the exact date on the second year of the course).

Those who do not successfully complete the MA you may be considered for the award of the Postgraduate Diploma. 

Those who do not successfully complete the Postgraduate Diploma  may be considered for the award of the Postgraduate Certificate.

The awards of the MA or Postgraduate Diploma are classified according to Pass/Merit/Distinction.  The Postgraduate Certificate is awarded unclassified.

Course unit details

Students will be required to complete 180 credits: 120 credits comprised of taught course units (each of 15 or 30 credits value), and an independent research element of the course worth 60 credits by way of a Masters dissertation of between 12,000 and 15,000 words, which is undertaken over the summer months of the course. The dissertation should be predominantly law-based.

On the full time course, the 120 taught credits can be split in one of two ways: (1) 60 credits in each of the two semesters; or (2) 75 credits in semester one and 45 credits in semester two.

Students registered on the MA in Healthcare Ethics and Law would need to select a majority of their optional courses from the ethics list (Ethics, Genetics and Genomics; Research Ethics). Global Health Law and Bioethics can count as an ethics or law course.

Details of all current course units available in the School of Law can be found on the Faculty of Humanities website.