Charles Foster

Charles Foster is a barrister practising at 4-5 Gray's Inn Square, and a Fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, where he teaches Medical Law and Ethics.

He is a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law, a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and a Research Associate at the Ethox Centre, the HeLEX Centre, and the Oxford Human Rights Hub, all at the University of Oxford.

Recently he has focused particularly on questions of identity, personhood, and authenticity, on whether theories of human dignity can do any real work in the law, and on the use of intuitions in moral and legal reasoning. The next substantial projects are (a) a collaboration with the Freie Universitat, Berlin, on the use made in England and Germany of the notion of human dignity, and (b) the How Institutions Think project – a multi-disciplinary venture under the auspices of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford (Professor Steve Rayner), which examines distributed cognition in institutional frameworks. His part is to analyse how such distributed cognition does and should affect the identity of the individuals within institutions, and to suggest what this should mean for legal regulation.

His personal website is www.charlesfoster.co.uk