Age, ageing, and the philosophy of ‘elder law’: An interview with Israel (Issi) Doron

Gerontology—the multidisciplinary study of the process of ageing and its medical and social consequences for older adults—has often not been given its due by either legal practitioners or legal academics. While we have witnessed several social movements advocating for the rights and interests of other marginalised groups, discrimination against older adults has also not been the subject of any mass action comparable to those movements. Consequently, the position of older adults within legal systems has frequently been bypassed, especially outside the United States of America. However, the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly brought the precarious position of older adults into the spotlight, be it in care homes during lockdowns or in hospitals through several waves or with regard to priority access to vaccines. At each juncture, governments took recourse to legal regulation to mitigate the impact of the disease on what they understood to be the most vulnerable sections of the population. But some of these rules were subjected to criticism, especially from older adults themselves, because of their overbreadth, and on account of the protectionism and infantilisation of older adults that they entailed. In this interview, Professor Israel (Issi) Doron, Dean of the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences of the University of Haifa, Israel, discusses how academia, strategic litigation, and advocacy and activism have finally begun taking the field of ‘jurisprudential gerontology’ into serious consideration.