Hoda Hosseiny

Hoda is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Law, Lund University. Her PhD project explores the interrelation between law, vulnerability, capacity, and autonomy by excavating their philosophical foundations. Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), she investigates whether universal legal capacity and unconditional respect for patients' refusal of treatment promote their autonomy meaningfully, or whether it may increase the vulnerability of those whose decisions may not reflect their genuine will.

In light of that, she investigates an alternative legal mechanism to universal legal capacity and to mental capacity assessment regimes (which conceptualize mental capacity mainly in cognitive terms). Specifically, in light of Article 12 of the CRPD, she examines how we may identify if a patient's will is genuine in a disability-neutral way. In addition, she explores how the use of advanced technologies in the assessment and treatment of psychosocial disorders may pose a further challenge to the exercise of personal autonomy by patients. Her PhD project is funded by WASP-HS (The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems, and Software Program – Humanities and Society). Hoda holds a bachelor's degree in law from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, and an LL.M. in International Trade Law from Leeds University in England.