Tony Zhou is Lecturer in Private Law at Queen Mary. He talks to us about himself, and his research.
I was born in Shanghai, China, and spent a lot of my childhood moving around different cities in New Zealand and Australia. I received my formal legal education in the sunny city of Brisbane at the University of Queensland. Following that, I practised corporate tax law for several years. During that time, I also took a break for one year to undertake an LLM at the University of Cambridge. My studies at Cambridge then inspired me to eventually pursue a doctorate there, which I completed in 2022. And somewhere along the PhD journey (if not upon deciding to pursue a PhD in the first place), I decided to leave practice behind me and pivot into academia. To that end, I am very much looking forward to starting as a lecturer at Queen Mary.
Up to now, I have mainly focused on defending a particular understanding of the concept ‘harm’, a central concept that features in private law (among other areas). In particular, I find very appealing the understanding of harm as a historical setback to wellbeing. The next step involves putting to use that understanding in order to shed light on some interesting related controversies. One such controversy I have already considered (in my PhD) is whether those who have been exposed to a risk of harm can be said to have suffered harm. This question has sparked much debate over the years, particularly as concerns loss of chance claims in negligence. On the basis of the understanding of harm that I defend, I think that those exposed to risks of harm can be said to have suffered harm.
My primary goal over the next few years is to continue applying my understanding of harm to other related controversies that I have not yet had the time to consider. A controversy that has recently been on my mind is whether there ought to be a distinction between withdrawing and withholding medical treatment. This distinction figures in some very interesting medical law cases, amongst others, and the prevailing view is that there ought not to be any such distinction. However, it seems to me that if one could instead view the withdrawal of treatment as harming the patient, and the withholding of treatment as merely failing to benefit the patient, the difference between harming and failing to benefit could in turn be used to ground a distinction between withdrawal and withholding of treatment. I suspect my work on this will eventually culminate in a book-length treatment of the concept ‘harm’.