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John Kenyon Mason (19 December 1919-26 January 2017), CBE, MD, LLD, FRCPath, DMJ, FRCPE, FRSE, and known as Ken Mason to us all, was Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1973-1985 and thereafter Emeritus Professor of Forensic Medicine and Honorary Fellow in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh. A formal obituary to Professor Mason is published in the Scotsman (http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-professor-ken-mason-medical-jurisprudence-pioneer-1-4357181). We offer some personal tributes to our friend and colleague.

This article fundamentally challenges the way in which law currently regulates human health research. It invokes the anthropological concept of liminality—the quality of in-between-ness—to suggest deeper ways of understanding ongoing challenges in delivering acceptable and effective regulation of research involving human participants. In stark contrast to the structural regulatory spaces constructed by law, the metaphor of the liminal space is explored to explain what is lost through our failure to see health research regulation as an inherently human experiential process, involving potentially profound transformative events for participants and researchers alike. The implications for the future of health research regulation are then examined. In particular, the analysis calls into question key features of the current regulatory paradigm, and demands that we reconsider our own demands of law in this context. The argument is made that health research is a liminal process and that we fail to treat it as such. This requires a rethink of corollary regulation also in processual terms. Ultimately, the charge is to undertake a radical reimagining of regulatory space to accommodate and promote liminal regulatory spaces.

This article addresses the unresolved conundrum of the legal status of consent forms used in research involving tissue samples or personal data. It identifies which rights participants might have by virtue of any consent form they have signed and which legal remedies might be available to them should the research depart from the terms of the original consent. The paper demonstrates that, although the legal status of consent forms is not clear in the UK, the landscape is evolving. We suggest that the growing legal protection afforded to autonomy and judicial recognition of individual property rights in tissues may offer opportunities for remedies in law where the regulatory regimes controlling uses of human tissue and personal data do not. However, we argue that in the governance of research relationships-which depend crucially on trust-resort to legal remedy may be undesirable. We suggest that treating consent as a one-off event that can be effectively captured in a written document-as the law tends to do-is an inappropriate and counter-productive approach. The aims of ethical research governance will be better served by seeing consent as continuing relational process, requiring on-going mutual respect, opportunity for communication, and accommodation of changing circumstances. The consent form is merely a framing instrument and only the starting point for a partnership that will evolve over time. Crucially, the limits of consent must be recognised in the design and governance of modern research practices. The article concludes with recommendations to reconceive consent in these terms.

The case of Akenzua v. Secretary of State for the Home Department concerned the death of a woman, Ms Zena Laws, at the hands of a man who had been imprisoned for armed robbery and who asserted that he was also a multiple murderer. Ms Laws’ administrators were successful in their appeal against the decision that their action for compensation should be struck out as having no chance of success. The report of the case in The Times followed the eye-catching headline: ‘Likely victim need not be known until harm done’. This was sufficient to prompt a mental comparison with Palmer v Tees Health Authority a case involving the murder of a child by a known paedophile in which a similar claim was rejected under the comparable headline: ‘Health authority too remote from victim’.