Masterclass with Lord Judge

King's students enjoy masterclass with Lord Judge

Dickson Poon Distinguished Visitor and Visiting Professor Lord Judge gave an exclusive lecture for King’s students on Monday 9 March. Entitled ‘Assisted Suicide: some moral and constitutional issues,’ the Masterclass invited students to think more holistically about this particular aspect of the criminal law, demonstrating that legal problems are rarely confined to discrete legal disciplines. 

Lord Judge began his masterclass by grounding the issue of assisted suicide in its historical context. Name dropping a ‘formidable quintet of philosophers’—Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and St Thomas More—he established that the moral questions were not new ones, and therefore not ones we could expect easy answers to.

The underlying concern that motivated Lord Judge’s masterclass was the failure of Parliament to address,head on, the issue of assisted suicide. He identified instances from the past 70 years where Parliament, as the conscious of the nation, took the lead in legislating on issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the death penalty. Assisted suicide, Lord Judge claimed, is a problem that similarly requires the attention of Parliament. This is because in the legislative vacuum that currently exists, judges are left to deal with cases that raise the issue of assisted suicide in a constitutionally unsatisfactory way.

In identifying and drawing out these two strands of the problem—moral and constitutional issues—Lord Judge encouraged his audience to grapple seriously with the question of how our society should address the issue of assisted suicide. He finished by warning students that this was a problem that they would have to take responsibility for in their life time.