Introduction

We all need to access healthcare at some point in our lives – and some may have a more continual or dramatic engagement with that care than others. As such, health law and ethics is a subject which is, and should be, of everyday importance and significance to everyone. In this collection, we have brought together emerging and established scholars in the broad field of health law and ethics to explore, assess, and evaluate the development of scholarship in the field by considering selected ‘leading works’ and their impact on the subject as a whole. This chapter explains why health law and ethics ‘matters’, what is meant by ‘leading work’, and how the leading works and the contributors were selected. The structure of each chapter is set out, and a brief outline of the leading work considered in each chapter, along with key arguments, is provided.