After Cambridge he worked on the comparative anatomy of the Himalayan
Hispid hare and
chemotaxis in
leeches, worked in Saudi Arabia studying the immobilisation of Goitred and Mountain gazelles, did pupillage at the English Bar, and was a research fellow at the
Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was a research assistant to
Aharon Barak, Justice (and later President) of the Supreme Court of Israel. He practises at the Bar in London, primarily in medical law, and has been involved in some of the most significant cases of recent years. He was called to the Bar of the Republic of Ireland in 1996. He teaches Medical Law and Ethics at the
University of Oxford and was a Visiting Fellow of Green College, Oxford. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of
Green Templeton College, Oxford. He left the college in 2022, when he was elected a Fellow of
Exeter College, Oxford. Recent expeditions have included the
Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, studying water metabolism in mules; ecological surveys in the
Quirimbas Archipelago, northern Mozambique, and a successful ski expedition to the
North Pole. He is a Fellow of the
Royal Geographical Society and the
Linnean Society. In the fields of law and philosophy he is probably best known for his criticisms of the hegemony of autonomy in medical ethics (in 'Choosing Life, Choosing Death' (2009)), and for his contention that the 'Four Principles' approach of
Tom Beauchamp and
James Childress is redundant, and should be replaced by an analysis based on a broadly Aristotelean account of human dignity ('Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law' (2011)). Many of his writings on religion have been attacked as heretical by conservative Christians, particularly in the US. As part of his philosophical investigations relating to authenticity and identity, he has tried living as a badger, an otter, an urban fox, a red deer and a swift, and he has written about this in his book
Being a Beast in 2016. For living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird, he won an
Ig Nobel prize in Biology. == Bibliography ==