Staff profile

Jordan is a first-year PhD student and Senior Tutor at Durham Law School. He completed both a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree and a Master of Jurisprudence (MJur) degree at Durham before continuing on to pursue a PhD. He teaches and guest lectures on the Law and Medicine module, having previously taught also on the Tort Law module.

Over the past year, Jordan has been a convenor for the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences (CELLS) and has worked as a research associate to Professor Emma Cave, working on the upcoming seventh edition of Medicine, Patients, and the Law. Jordan has also worked as a research and teaching assistant on the Frontiers in Biolaw and Global Environmental Law modules on the LLM.

He speaks English (natively), German, and French and has tutored in all three. He is slowly attempting to teach himself Russian, though this has not seen much success to date.

Office Hours

Jordan holds office hours from 11am - 12pm on term-time Mondays in PCL 181.

Current Research

Supervised by Dr Sam Halliday and Prof Emma Cave, his PhD research explores the value of human dignity in end-of-life decision-making. This is approached comparatively, examining the best interests frameworks in England and Wales alongside the presumed will (mutmaßlicher Wille) approach in Germany. The project proposes that the patient-centric values of the decision-making process in England and Wales have been poorly understood and inconsistently applied. Greater engagement with the principle of human dignity in English law, informed by the application of the principle in German law, will provide clarity on what the patient-centric approach requires and how patients can be treated as individuals rather than objects of medical interest.

• Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences
• Durham Centre for Law and Philosophy

Conference Paper

• Buck, JC (2021), Parents' wishes and interests in medical decision-making: comparative insights into Raqeeb, Annual PGR Conference. Durham Law School, Durham, England (online).
• Buck, JC (2021), Vergangenheitsbewältigung and active euthanasia in Germany, IME Postgraduate Bioethics Conference. Liverpool, England (online).