My most significant research contributions lie in the field that I have described as Health Care Law, where I am widely recognised as both having redefined the subject area and made a significant contribution to its theoretical understanding. My work is discussed as one of the main theoretical frameworks for the subject area in many monographs and textbooks; e.g. Hervey & McHale Health Law and the EU (2004); O'Donovan in the foreword and the editors Sheldon & Thomson, Feminist Perspectives on Health Care Law (1998); Veitch The Jurisdiction of Medical Law (2007), Coggon What Makes Health Public? (2012). Reviewers of the first edition of my textbook Health Care Law described my work as: ‘some of the most important and interesting legal analysis of medical law as a discipline' (Journal of Medical Ethics), and suggested that I had ‘...created in the last 10 years vantage points from which to get a better sense of the legal environment, framing perspectives through existing sociological insights and informed with empirical findings' (Lancet).

The three principal strands of my approach are that (a) the subject area is better understood as ‘Health Care Law’ than ‘Medical Law’, (b) the widespread assumption that ‘medical law’ is concerned with subjecting doctors to legal regulation in order to promote ethical goals, misrepresents the practice of law-makers who have mostly sought to integrate professional norms into legal practice and reinforce them rather than challenge them, and (c) that more attention needs to be paid to the need to legitimate legal interventions in health care ethics.

More recently, I have developed a programme of work around 'Bioethics Governance', drawing attention to the practices that have emerged to address bioethical issues and bridging the academic and policy disciplines that have interests in the field. The approach is described in my piece 'Bioethics as a Governance Practice' (2016) (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10728-015-0310-2#/page-1) and developed in a number of pieces including 'Bioethics after Brexit' (http://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1591064/1). My J Kenyon Mason Annual Lecture 2017, 'New Bearings in Health Research Ethics: Towards a Social Contract Paradigm', set out a programme of issues that we need to take forward if we are to keep pace with the ethics of health and social care research (https://youtu.be/IkaKkb3Yc3E). My paper to the Council of Europe Conference celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Oviedo Convention concerned the origins and future of restructions on modification of the human germline (http://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/publication/1591062/1).