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Medical Jurisprudence

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Health Law and Policy

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Constitutionalizing Abortion Rights In Canada, Joanna Erdman Jan 2017

Constitutionalizing Abortion Rights In Canada, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article endeavours to understand the feminist activism from which constitutional abortion rights in Canada were born in the landmark Supreme Court case of R v Morgentaler 1988, and the influence of these rights on continued feminist activism for reproductive justice. Part I reviews abortion practice in the ‘back-alley’ prior to and immediately after the 1969 criminal reform with attention to the direct service activism of liberation feminists in their campaign to repeal the abortion law as a matter of constitutional justice. Part II turns to adjudication in the courts to study how judicial reasoning channelled these constitutional claims, exploring …


Agonizing Identity In Mental Health Law And Policy (Part I), Sheila Wildeman Jan 2016

Agonizing Identity In Mental Health Law And Policy (Part I), Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this two-part paper, the author explores the significance of identity in mental health law and policy. In this as in other socio-legal domains, identity functions to consolidate dissent as well as to effect social control. The author asks: where do legal experts stand in relation to the identity categories that run so deep in this area of law and policy? More broadly, she asks: is “mental health” working on us — on the mental health disabled, legal scholars, all of us — in ways that are impairing our capacity for social justice? In the first part of the paper, …


Agonizing Identity In Mental Health Law And Policy (Part Ii): A Political Taxonomy Of Psychiatric Subjectification, Sheila Wildeman Jan 2016

Agonizing Identity In Mental Health Law And Policy (Part Ii): A Political Taxonomy Of Psychiatric Subjectification, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This is the second part of a two-part essay exploring the function of identity in mental health law and policy, or more broadly, the function of identity in the politics of mental health. Part one began with the Foucauldian exhortation to undertake a “critical ontology of ourselves,” and adopted the methodology of autoethnography to explore the construction or constructedness of the author’s identity as an expert working in the area of mental health law and policy. That part concluded with a gesture of resistance to identification on one or the other side of the mental health/ illness divide (the divide …


Genetic And Metabolic Screening Of Newborns: Must Health Care Providers Seek Explicit Parental Consent?, Sheila Wildeman, Jocelyn Downie Jan 2001

Genetic And Metabolic Screening Of Newborns: Must Health Care Providers Seek Explicit Parental Consent?, Sheila Wildeman, Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this paper, we provide some background on the history of newborn screening and the legal context within which questions regarding consent must be answered, and then turn to the various arguments that can be made for and against the current approach to parental consent to genetic and metabolic tests administered as part of provincial/territorial newborn screening programs. In the end, we conclude that either practice should be changed to align it with current law such that explicit parental consent is sought for the established tests, or that advocates for maintaining current practices should lobby for legislation permitting newborn screening …