Law Commons^™

Medical Assistance In Dying: Lessons For Australia From Canada, Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Canada has recently witnessed dramatic changes in end-of-life law and policy. Most notably, we have moved from a prohibitive to a permissive regime with respect to medical assistance in dying (MAiD). As a number of Australian states are actively engaged in debates about whether to decriminalise MAiD, it is worth reviewing the Canadian experience and drawing out any lessons that might usefully inform the current processes in Australia.

Revisiting The Economic Community Of West African States: A Socio-Legal Analysis, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

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Recent years have seen a growing scholarly interest in the conditions of emergence of regional trade agreements in Africa. These analyses have advanced our knowledge on a range of technical issues, from specific institutional transformation of regional economic communities such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to broad legal issues relating to the provisions of the regional trade agreements. Most literature on ECOWAS is, however, informed by legal formalism that interprets the text of the treaties strictly and without context, leading to a dominant interpretation of failure.

By contrast, this thesis adopts a socio-legal approach and argues …

Next Up: A Proposal For Values-Based Law Reform On Unilateral Withholding And Withdrawal Of Potentially Life-Sustaining Treatment, Jocelyn Downie, Lindy Willmott, Ben White

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

As the legalization of assisted dying shifts from a project for law reform to one of implementation, the gaze for Canadian end of life law and policy academics and practitioners should be turned quickly to another pressing issue – the unilateral withholding and withdrawal of potentially life-sustaining treatment. What should happen when the health care team believes that treatment should not be provided and the patient’s loved ones believe that it should? While the future of end of life law and policy no doubt includes many other issues, this is an urgent and immediate horizon issue for Canada as well …

What Is The Purpose Of The Orphan Drug Act?, Matthew Herder

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The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) [1], first enacted in the United States in 1983, was set up to encourage the development of drugs for rare diseases. At that time, drug therapies for such diseases were rarely developed. Three decades later, a growing proportion of industry research and development (R&D) [2] and regulatory drug approvals [3] target diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 persons in the United States, the prevalence-based threshold of rare disease under the ODA.

In a new article published in PLOS Medicine, Aaron Kesselheim and colleagues document an embedded trend: within the …

Federalism And Health Care In Canada: A Troubled Romance?, Colleen M. M. Flood, William Lahey Prof., Bryan P. Thomas

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Canadian federalism fragments health system governance. Although the Constitution has been interpreted as providing shared jurisdiction over health generally, with respect to health care, the courts have interpreted it as giving direct jurisdiction to the provinces. The federal role in health care is therefore indirect, but nevertheless potentially powerful. For example, the federal government has used its spending powers to establish the Canada Health Act (CHA), which commits funding to provinces on condition they provide first-dollar public coverage of hospital and physician services. However, in recent times, as federal contributions have declined, the CHA has been weakly enforced. …