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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Law
Nom De Plume: Who Writes The Supreme Court's "By The Court" Judgments?, Peter Mccormick
Nom De Plume: Who Writes The Supreme Court's "By The Court" Judgments?, Peter Mccormick
Dalhousie Law Journal
For several dozen of its major decisions, the Supreme Court in recent decades has adopted an unusual judgment style-the unanimous and anonymous "By the Court" format. Unlike judgments attributed to specific justices, "By the Court" presents an unusual and impersonal institutionalist face. But what is happening behind the fagade? Are these deeply collegial products with the actual drafting divided between some (or most, or all) of the justices? Is it "business as usual" which for major judgments involves rotation between the senior judges? Or is it simply a pseudonym for the Chief Justice writing alone in an unusually emphatic way? …
Permitting Voluntary Euthanasia And Assisted Suicide: Law Reform Pathways For Common Law Jurisdictions, Jocelyn Downie
Permitting Voluntary Euthanasia And Assisted Suicide: Law Reform Pathways For Common Law Jurisdictions, Jocelyn Downie
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
End of life law and policy reform is the subject of much discussion around the world. This paper explores the pathways to permissive legal regimes that have been tried in various common law jurisdictions. These include legislation, prosecutorial charging guidelines, court challenges, jury nullification, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in the absence of offence-specific charging guidelines, and the exercise of judicial discretion in sentencing. In this paper, I describe these pathways as taken (or attempted) in five common law jurisdictions (USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) and reflect briefly on lessons that can be drawn from the recent experiences …
Medical Certificates Of Death: First Principles And Established Practices Provide Answers To New Questions, Jocelyn Downie, Kacie Oliver
Medical Certificates Of Death: First Principles And Established Practices Provide Answers To New Questions, Jocelyn Downie, Kacie Oliver
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
Voluntary euthanasia became legal in Quebec in December 2015,1 although the legislation is currently the subject of litigation. In addition, physician-assisted death will become legal across Canada in February 2016, barring an extension on the deadline being given by the Supreme Court of Canada. There are many questions about how physician-assisted death should be regulated. One as-yet-unanswered question is “Should physician-assisted death be recorded anywhere on the medical certificate of death?” If so, a second question follows: “How should it be recorded — as manner and/or cause?” and if the latter, “Which category of cause: immediate, antecedent or underlying?”
To …
Judging The Social Sciences In Carter V Canada (Ag), Jodi Lazare
Judging The Social Sciences In Carter V Canada (Ag), Jodi Lazare
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
This paper examines a recent example of evidence-based decision making affecting social policy at the trial court level. It offers a close reading of Carter v Canada (AG), decided by the British Columbia Supreme Court, and of Justice Lynn Smith's careful scrutiny of the social science evidence when invalidating the Criminal Code prohibition on assistance in dying. Drawing on literature which examines the legal system's use of social science evidence and expert witnesses, this paper suggests that Justice Smith's treatment of the evidence in Carter provides an example of skilled judicial treatment of the extensive amounts of social science evidence …
Digital Evidence And The Adversarial System, Colton Fehr
Digital Evidence And The Adversarial System, Colton Fehr
Canadian Journal of Law and Technology
Scholars have observed that the adversarial system tends to provide courts with only a ‘‘small snapshot of the technological whole,” which in turn forms the record upon which broader legal pronouncements occur. As a result, they contend that legislatures should be more proactive in making rules governing complex and rapidly advancing technologies, and that courts must show deference to these rules. Other scholars retort that, in practice, legislatures often fail to update obviously flawed and outdated privacy provisions. Whether due to special interest influence, majoritarian dislike of criminal suspects, or other institutional constraints, legislative responses have been wanting. As such, …