“Well, I think that, I just feel like a young man, I’m so young! I can't believe it, I’m the youngest person,” declared President Trump, then aged 72. His refusal to accept the fact of ageing captures a contemporary attitude towards growing older. We need not be constrained by our biological age. What matters is how old we feel.

From a young age we are used to the idea of life being a journey with different stages. What child has not longed to be grown up? What middle-aged person has not longed for the glories of youth? And what older person has not reminisced over the story of their life? But, natural as these questions might appear, they are built on a series of suppositions: assumptions about the different stages of life and their different value. The idea of the natural course of life is for some a comfort, but for others it is a restriction. For example, the assumptions around old age being a time for rest and relaxation may be appealing to some, but something to fight against for others.

This book will explore the different stages of life and examine the role of the law in establishing, reinforcing and regulating them. It is surprising that while life course theory has been an influential approach to a wide range of academic disciplines, there has been relatively little use of it made by lawyers. Perhaps that is because it is an ambitious, no doubt overly ambitious, task to seek to present a legal analysis of the whole of the life course. Great academic careers have been built on the study of just small aspects of this: the law and childhood, for example. However, it may also reflect a commitment by lawyers to the principle that everyone is equal before the law and so there is no need to distinguish different ages. I well remember one colleague expressing surprise when I told him I was writing a book on law and older people, commenting, “How odd. Whatever next, the law and blonde people?” That, I expect, showed a rather particular understanding of legal scholarship with law writing designed around legal categories such as contracts, tort and property, rather than around how normal people (by which I mean non-lawyers!) understand the world.