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. She primarily focuses on personal autonomy and decisional capacity of patients in the context of healthcare. Hoda’s project challenges the dominant way of understanding personal autonomy as non-interference and uses vulnerability theory in order to have a vulnerability-based analysis of capacity and re-conceptualise the foundational principles of informed consent.

Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disability (CRPD), she explores whether universal legal capacity and unconditional respect for patients’ refusal of treatment promote their autonomy meaningfully, or rather it may increase the vulnerability of those whose decisions may not reflect their true will. In light of that, she investigates an alternative legal mechanism to universal legal capacity and to mental capacity assessment regimes (which conceptualise mental capacity mainly in cognitive terms). In particular, in light of Article 12 of the CRPD, she investigates how we may identify if a patient’s will is reliable 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 of patients. Her PhD project is funded by WASP-HS (The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society). Hoda holds an LL.M degree in International Trade Law from University of Leeds, England.