Singapore’s drug laws are a ubiquitous part of our criminal justice system. Drug offences are among the most litigated criminal offences, and convictions for drug trafficking account for very many of the executions in Singapore. Ask any criminal defence lawyer, and they will say they have had experience, perhaps many experiences, with clients accused of drug offences. Ask them whether they believe those offences serve a valuable purpose, and the answer will probably be “yes”. Ask further whether the existing legal framework is the best way to further those purposes, and the response may be more equivocal.

Reimagining Health Law is an edited volume in which the editors, Atina Krajewska and Jean McHale, both of Birmingham University, have brought together a cross-disciplinary team of experts to rethink how health law as a field has been – and should be – conceptualised. The central question, which kicks off the introductory chapter is succinct: “What constitutes health law today, both as a set of legal principles and as an academic field?” The book addresses this question in two distinct parts. The first lays the foundation of health law with the editors drawing insights from selected primary areas of law that interact with and shape health law. The second part of the book studies health law from cross-disciplinary perspectives, mapping the boundaries and borders of the field.

To act or not to act. To intervene or stand aside. Are these only moral questions, or should they also be legal ones? They arise when a doctor withdraws treatment, when a passer-by fails to help someone in danger and increasingly, when machines are designed to make choices on our behalf. As autonomous systems become more common and societies grapple with issues of ageing populations and end-of-life care, the line between doing harm and allowing harm to occur is likely to become even more controversial. Dr Roni Rosenberg’s Act and Omission in Criminal Law: Autonomy, Morality and Applications to Euthanasia takes this long-standing problem as its starting point. Despite what the title suggests, the book is not only about euthanasia. Its central concern is a deeper question about the distinction between acts and omissions and what justifies that distinction. At the heart of the analysis, Rosenberg considers the relevance of identifying a duty to act as an anchor for justifying criminal liability in omissions.