Obituary: Professor Margaret Brazier

Born in 1950, Margaret Brazier – known to friends as Margot – joined the University of Manchester as a lecturer immediately after graduating in 1971, and went on to become the University's youngest ever professor. In 1986, long before medical law became an option on undergraduate law degrees, Margot and her philosopher colleague and friend Professor John Harris set up Manchester's Centre for Social Ethics and Policy. As well as the remarkable body of multi-disciplinary research produced there over the past four decades by Margot, John and their wonderful colleagues, the Centre's Masters' programmes in Healthcare Law and Ethics and their pioneering Bioethics and Medical Jurisprudence PhD by publication have educated many of the leading figures in the field today.

Margot played a leading role in pioneering healthcare law as a new category of legal analysis. Starting off as a torts scholar working alongside Professor Harry Street, and having co-edited two of the leading textbooks on tort law – Street on Torts (buy from Amazon UK) and Clerk and Lindsell on Torts (buy from Amazon UK) –, Margot played a crucial role in the development of the doctrine of informed consent in the UK. Her work on responsibility and autonomy was equally groundbreaking and significant, encompassing subjects as diverse as the use of human body parts, children's medical decision-making, assisted reproduction, HIV/AIDs and public health.

Margot had wide-ranging interests in healthcare law, often taking a distinctively historical approach. Although commonly assumed to be a young discipline, Margot maintained that there was a long and rich history of law's engagement with medicine. In her 2023 monograph Law and Healing: A History of a Stormy Marriage (buy from Amazon UK), she tracked the relationship between law and medicine from the 13th to the 19th century. Drawing connections with today's concerns she maintained that attention to the past is critical if we are not to repeat mistakes. On medical litigation she challenged the assumption that deference to the medical profession has deep historical roots, finding no such evidence of deference in early law reports. On bodily sovereignty she demonstrated a longstanding right to consent to and refuse treatment, provided, that is, the patient was male and adult. A staunch supporter of many female academics in healthcare law and beyond, Margot also sought to reduce inequalities in women's health.

Margot's essential, concise and eminently readable textbook Medicine, Patients and the Law (buy from Amazon UK) was first published in 1987, and its seventh edition – now coauthored with Professors Emma Cave and Rob Heywood – was published in 2023. In addition to her own work and her ambitious collaborative research projects, Margot made a major contribution to the discipline of healthcare law as editor in chief of the Medical Law Review until 2012.

A pioneer in her academic contribution, Margot was also a leader in law reform and policy debate. Her wisdom, compassion and encyclopaedic knowledge of healthcare law were put to good use in her various public roles, as chair of the Animal Procedures Committee (1993-98), the Review of Surrogacy Arrangements (1996-98), the Retained Organs Commission (2001-2004) and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' Working Party on Critical Care Decisions in Fetal and Neonatal Medicine (2004-2006). In those roles, her academic focus on resolving practical medical dilemmas was complemented by outstanding propensities to listen, respect, provoke, encapsulate and ultimately to find consensus across different professions and perspectives.

Testament to the high esteem in which Margot is held by her colleagues is a special edition of the Medical Law Review in her honour, and a 2016 festschrift – aptly entitled Pioneering Healthcare Law: Essays in Honour of Margaret Brazier (buy from Amazon UK) – edited by Dr Catherine Stanton, Professor Sarah Devaney, Professor Anne-Maree Farrell and Dr Alexandra Mullock.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1994, the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2007 and the British Academy in 2014, Margot was also appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1997, Queen's Counsel (honoris causa) in 2008 and awarded the Halsbury Legal Award for Academic Contribution in 2013. Last year, the Society of Legal Scholars created the Margaret Brazier book prizes for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in her honour and Margot received the Ted Shotter Lifetime Recognition medal for endeavour in medical ethics.

As anyone who knew Margot will confirm, honours like these mattered much less to her than time spent with family and nurturing the careers of her students and junior colleagues. All of us who knew Margot will remember particular instances of kindness, wit, thoughtfulness and generosity. All of us will recall the unwavering love and pride she had in her husband, Rodney and their daughter, Vicky.

Margot was not just a leading figure in modern healthcare law, she was the pre-eminent medico-legal scholar of the 20th and 21st centuries. But Margot will always be remembered not only for her extraordinary academic brilliance and public service, but also for her fundamental decency, humour, modesty and kind-heartedness.