Professor John Coggon

John Coggon is Professor of Law in the Centre for Health, Law, and Society at the University of Bristol Law School in the United Kingdom. He is also a member of the University of Bristol’s Population Health Science Institute and Centre for Public Health. Beyond the University, he is an Honorary Member of the UK Faculty of Public Health (FPH), sits on the ethics committees of the FPH and the British Medical Journal, and is a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 

John’s research focuses especially on philosophical and socio-legal questions in public and global health ethics and law and mental capacity law, examined in particular through methods of moral and political analysis. His academic works include the books What Makes Health Public? (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and, with Keith Syrett and A.M. Viens, Public Health Law: Ethics, Governance, and Regulation (Routledge, 2017). With A.M. Viens, John was commissioned by the UK Department of Health to write Public Health Ethics in Practice (2017), and he has contributed through FPH in the production of academic and public and practitioner-focused resources on public health ethics and law. He is and has been on many funded research projects, including (until summer 2022) the UK Research and Innovation-funded UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator and the UK Prevention Research Partnership-funded Tackling the Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development.