Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 23 of 23

Full-Text Articles in Law

Informing The Future Of End-Of-Life Care In Canada: Lessons From The Quebec Legislative Experience, Michelle Giroux Oct 2016

Informing The Future Of End-Of-Life Care In Canada: Lessons From The Quebec Legislative Experience, Michelle Giroux

Dalhousie Law Journal

There have been numerous and challenging developments respecting endof-life care in Canada. In Quebec, political consensus and changes in public opinion led to the adoption of end-of-life care legislation. This paper discusses the context and foundation of that reform and reviews its content with the objective of informing the future of end-of-life care in Canada. In the first part of the paper I explore the balancing of the right to life and autonomy, with a focus on the approach chosen in Quebec by the Legal Experts Panel Report. In Part 11, I discuss Quebec's adoption of An Act Respecting End-of-Life …


Aboriginal Consultation In Canadian Water Negotiations:The Mackenzie Bilateral Water Management Agreements, Andrea Beck Oct 2016

Aboriginal Consultation In Canadian Water Negotiations:The Mackenzie Bilateral Water Management Agreements, Andrea Beck

Dalhousie Law Journal

Due to constitutional protection of Aboriginal water rights, the Canadian government has a duty to consult Aboriginal peoples in water-related decision making. In 2015, Alberta and the Northwest Territories signed an agreement for managing their shared waters in the Mackenzie River Basin. In light of Canada's record, observers have praised the preceding negotiation process as pathbreaking due to its high level of Aboriginal involvement. To evaluate such claims, this paper analyzes Aboriginal consultations in the 2011-2015 NWT-Alberta transboundary water negotiation. The comparative case study reaches the following conclusions. In their bilateral water negotiation, the two jurisdictions differed markedly in terns …


Cross-Cultural Dynamics In Palliative Care: The Emerging Canadian Scenario, Chidi Oguamanam Oct 2016

Cross-Cultural Dynamics In Palliative Care: The Emerging Canadian Scenario, Chidi Oguamanam

Dalhousie Law Journal

As modern technologies leverage medical sciences, life expectancy is on the rise in Canada, and indeed globally with a remarkable increase in the elderly population in need of health care. The same is true of the diversity of cultural groups who are now patrons and stakeholders in Canada's health care landscape. An emergent feature ofthis landscape is the complexity ofcontexts for negotiating and mediating medical care delivery at the end of life. This paper examines the gaps in regulatory and legal interventions as well as the gaps and opportunities to negotiate the transition to palliative care in cross-cultural contexts that …


A Goal-Oriented Understanding Of The Right To Health Care And Its Implications For Future Health Rights Litigation, Michael Da Silva Oct 2016

A Goal-Oriented Understanding Of The Right To Health Care And Its Implications For Future Health Rights Litigation, Michael Da Silva

Dalhousie Law Journal

International human rights law recognizes a right to health. A majority of domestic constitutions recognize health-related rights. Many citizens believe that they have a moral right to health care. Some theorists agree. Yet the idea of a right to health care remains controversial. Specifying the nature of such a right invites more controversy. Indeed, most models of the right face persistent problems that threaten to undermine the conceptual coherence of a right to health care. This article accordingly sketches preliminary arguments for a new, goal-oriented model of the right to health care. It explains that the model avoids most of …


And Miles To Go Before I Sleep: The Future Of End-Of-Life Law And Policy In Canada, Jocelyn Downie Oct 2016

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep: The Future Of End-Of-Life Law And Policy In Canada, Jocelyn Downie

Dalhousie Law Journal

This paper reviews the legal status of a number ofend-of-life law and policy issues that have, to date, been overshadowed by debates about medical assistance in dying. It suggests that law reform is needed in relation to palliative sedation without artificial hydration and nutrition, advance directives for the withholding and withdrawal of oral hydration and nutrition, unilateral withholding and withdrawal of potentially life-sustaining treatment, and the determination of death. To leave the law in its current uncertain state is to leavepatients vulnerable to having no access to interventions that they want or at the other extreme, being forced to receive …


Dna, Donor Offspring And Derivative Citizenship: Redefining Parentage Under The Citizenship Act, Stefanie Carsley Oct 2016

Dna, Donor Offspring And Derivative Citizenship: Redefining Parentage Under The Citizenship Act, Stefanie Carsley

Dalhousie Law Journal

Under Canada's Citizenship Act, children born outside Canada acquire derivative citizenship-that is, citizenship through descent or parentage-if at least one of their parents is Canadian. However according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, in order to qualify for derivative citizenship a child must have a genetic link to a Canadian citizen. Canadians who use donated sperm or eggs to conceive-including women who give birth using donated eggs-are therefore not considered parents for citizenship purposes. According to the Federal Court of Appeal, Canadian donors may also pass on their citizenship to their genetic offspring. This article argues that current interpretations of the …


Out Of The Black Hole: Toward A Fresh Approach To Tort Causation, Allan C. Hutchinson Oct 2016

Out Of The Black Hole: Toward A Fresh Approach To Tort Causation, Allan C. Hutchinson

Dalhousie Law Journal

The present state of Canadian doctrine on causation in tort law is in serious disarray Judges and jurists persist in thinking that it is a factual inquiry separate from policy concerns. This is made obvious in the recent Supreme Court decision in Clements and in the academic commentary around it. In contrast, I insist that the requirement of causation must be understood as being entirely part of the broader debate on the goals and policies of tort law generally Causation is a topic drenched with normative values and should be treated as such.


The Doctrine Of Lost Modern Grant And Prescriptive Easements In Newfoundland, Greg French Oct 2016

The Doctrine Of Lost Modern Grant And Prescriptive Easements In Newfoundland, Greg French

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article examines the history and development of prescriptive easements in Newfoundland and Labrador and the legal standards required to find such an easement to exist. The article concludes that the appropriate inquiry is not merely an examination of the length of use, but also the nature and extent of use, and that rigid application of timelines should not apply.


The Future Of Health Law: How Can Law Meet Emerging Health Challenges?, Colleen M. Flood, Lorian Hardcastle Oct 2016

The Future Of Health Law: How Can Law Meet Emerging Health Challenges?, Colleen M. Flood, Lorian Hardcastle

Dalhousie Law Journal

Canadians have often prided themselves on having one of the best health-care systems in the world, but in recent years our system has fallen to the bottom of relevant international comparisons. Incremental attempts to improve the system have not resulted in significant improvements and the reality is that our most pressing challenges can be addressed only through ambitious, systemic reforms. For example, it is well established that Canada's patchwork scheme for providing long-term care will not scale to meet growing needs as a quarter ofthe population enters retirement age over the next two decades.' As yet further examples, the Canadian …


Imagining Global Health With Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin Oct 2016

Imagining Global Health With Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article offers a way to achieve global health with justice as a global health imperative. It is possible to have global health without justice, meaning that improvements in health outcomes could be achieved, but without a fair distribution of the benefits of good health. It is also possible to have justice without global health, where health outcomes are evenly distributed across the population but overall health is not improved. With this understanding, this article challenges current ways of understanding global health, and argues that absolute reductions in morbidity and premature mortality are not robust indicators of success in the …


Modernizing The Canada Health Act, Colleen M. Flood, Bryan Thomas Oct 2016

Modernizing The Canada Health Act, Colleen M. Flood, Bryan Thomas

Dalhousie Law Journal

The Canada Health Act (CHA) was adopted in 1984, to shore up a health-care system conceptualized in the 1960s. Under the CHA, universal coverage is limited to "medicallynecessary" hospital and physician services, to the exclusion of vital goods and services such as outpatient pharmaceuticals, dental care, long-term care, and many mental health services. Inequities resulting from these gaps in public coverage are partly to blame for pushing Canada's health system to the bottom ofrecent international rankings. But there is more to modernizing Canada s health care system, we argue, than filling these gaps in universal coverage. Every major health system …


A Consumer Protection Perspective On Regulation For Healthier Eating, Barbara Von Tigerstrom Oct 2016

A Consumer Protection Perspective On Regulation For Healthier Eating, Barbara Von Tigerstrom

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article explores the potential for a consumer protection perspective to complement public health approaches in designing and justifying laws that aim to promote healthier eating, such as food labelling regulations or restrictions on marketing and advertising. Consumer protection and public health are distinct perspectives, but they share the goal of protecting health and both accept the need for regulation to protect important interests. Consumer protection objectives could be used to defend public health measures that are challenged as infringing rights or restricting trade. Insights from consumer law and scholarship could also contribute to discussions about when regulatory intervention to …


Legal Barriers To Age Discrimination In Hiring Complaints, Pnina Alon-Shenker Apr 2016

Legal Barriers To Age Discrimination In Hiring Complaints, Pnina Alon-Shenker

Dalhousie Law Journal

Studies have shown that senior workers endure longer spells of unemployment than their younger counterparts. Age discrimination has been identified as one of the main obstacles to reemployment. This article critically examines how Canadian anti-age discrimination law has responded to the contemporary challenges experienced by senior job seekers. It articulates several difficulties in our existing age discrimination legal framework by analyzing and contrasting social science literature on the present labour market experience of senior job applicants with human rights tribunal and court decisions in hiring complaints. It concludes by sketching a preliminary set of workable proposals for change that derives …


Doctoral Studies In Law: From The Inside Out, Dia Dabby, Bethany Hastie, Jocelyn Stacey Apr 2016

Doctoral Studies In Law: From The Inside Out, Dia Dabby, Bethany Hastie, Jocelyn Stacey

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article explores the purpose, structure and experience of doctoral studies in Canadian law schools. Relying on an auto-ethnographic methodology where we draw on our personal experience as doctoral students, we identify three tensions in doctoral studies in law. We explore how these tensions-between practice/theory structure/space, and supervisory/other relationships-emerge from the structure of doctoral studies in law and how they manifest themselves in the lived experience of doctoral students. We detail how these tensions are a product of the ambiguous and underexplored nature ofdoctoral studies in law. By making these tensions explicit, we encourage doctoral students, law professors and administrators …


Public Institutions As Defamation Plaintiffs, Hilary Young Apr 2016

Public Institutions As Defamation Plaintiffs, Hilary Young

Dalhousie Law Journal

This article focuses on public institutions' ability to sue in defamation. It has a descriptive and a normative section. The descriptive part begins with an analysis of the relevant law in several common law jurisdictions. The state of Canadian law is then examined. The normative section considers which public institutions should be prohibited from suing in defamation and why Whereas some case law suggests that a prohibition on public institution defamation actions should be grounded in the public importance of speech about such institutions, this article takes the position that that is unprincipled. Instead, the focus is on factors such …


Death To Semelhago!, Bruce Ziff Apr 2016

Death To Semelhago!, Bruce Ziff

Dalhousie Law Journal

In the 1996 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Semelhago v. Paramadevan, Justice John Sopinka stated that it is no longer appropriate to assume that specific performance will issue as a matter of course to enforce a contract for the sale of land. Before performance will be ordered, it must be proven (and not assumed) that common law damages for breach of contract will not suffice to do justice. In this article, Semel hago and the case law generated in its aftermath will be reviewed, and the policy arguments pertaining to the current law addressed. In short, it …


Of Lodestars And Lawyers: Incorporating The Duty Of Loyalty Into The Model Code Of Conduct, Colin Jackson, Richard Devlin, Brent Cotter Apr 2016

Of Lodestars And Lawyers: Incorporating The Duty Of Loyalty Into The Model Code Of Conduct, Colin Jackson, Richard Devlin, Brent Cotter

Dalhousie Law Journal

The "conflicts quartet" ofcases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada can be understood as part of a long-standing tension in Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence between two competing conceptions of a lawyer's professional identity In the most recent of these cases, C.N. Railway v. McKercher, the Supreme Court conclusively preferred the loyalty-centred conception of the practice of law over the entrepreneurial conception. While the Federation of Law Societies of Canada amended its Model Code of Professional Conduct in 2014 in response to the Supreme Court's decision in McKercher, this article argues that those amendments did not go far enough. The authors propose …


Nom De Plume: Who Writes The Supreme Court's "By The Court" Judgments?, Peter Mccormick Apr 2016

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? …


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

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

Dalhousie Law Journal

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 authors 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 …


Canadian Perspectives On Animals And The Law, Sabrina Tremblay-Huet Apr 2016

Canadian Perspectives On Animals And The Law, Sabrina Tremblay-Huet

Dalhousie Law Journal

It is commonplace to affirm that animal law is much more developed in the United States than in Canada; animal abuser registries are being implemented,' animal law degrees are offered,2 and prosecutions ofanimal abusers occur frequently,3 for example. However, the tide is changing in Canada as well, the legal norms and case law becoming increasingly aligned with the social norms surrounding the treatment of animals. An example ofthis is the recent adoption by Quebec ofa new status for animals in its Civil Code, the Loi visant 1'amiliorationde la situationjuridiquede l'animal, adopted on December 4th, 2015.' There are also new challenges …


Not Ideas Of The Thing But The Thing Itself: Imagining A Support Group For Separated And Divorced Fathers As A Site Of Legal Education, Thomas Mcmorrow Apr 2016

Not Ideas Of The Thing But The Thing Itself: Imagining A Support Group For Separated And Divorced Fathers As A Site Of Legal Education, Thomas Mcmorrow

Dalhousie Law Journal

Legal education is not just about attaining an abstract knowledge of formal institutions, norms, and processes; it is also about developing insight into oneself and ones relationships. Therefore, understanding and developing the personal and social conditions that make governance through law possible are crucial elements of legal education. This article highlights legal education's potential role in fostering every person's sense of implication in-and responsibility forbuilding a just society In order to illustrate this concept, this article looks at the ways in which DADs, a support group for separated and divorced fathers, constitutes a site of legal education.


Limiting The Legal Liability Of Religious Institutions For Their Clergy: Cavanaugh V Grenville Christian College, M H. Ogilvie Apr 2016

Limiting The Legal Liability Of Religious Institutions For Their Clergy: Cavanaugh V Grenville Christian College, M H. Ogilvie

Dalhousie Law Journal

The purpose of this article is to explore the case law relating to the potential legal liability of ecclesiastical institutions for the conduct of their clergy and lay employees in the tort of negligence, vicarious liability and breach of fiduciary duty While a number of cases have resulted in findings of liability especially in those relating to the Indian residential schools, a recent decision from the Ontario Court of Appeal, Cavanaugh v. Grenville Christian College, suggests ways of thinking about the limits and scope of liability for institutions whose charitable purposes are occasionally betrayed by rogue persons over whom theymay …


High Freshets And Low-Lying Farms: Property Law And St. John River Flooding In Colonial New Brunswick, Jason Hall Apr 2016

High Freshets And Low-Lying Farms: Property Law And St. John River Flooding In Colonial New Brunswick, Jason Hall

Dalhousie Law Journal

Although New Brunswick was founded on private land ownership, colonists who settled low-lying land along the St. John River found that the waterway's erratic flood cycle and ever-changing nature threatened their lives and farms, and thwarted their efforts to divide riverbanks and islands into fixed parcels of private property. This article draws upon colonial petitions, sessional court records, and colonial legislation in analyzing the response of the colonial legislature and of local governance to the challenge that the St. John River created for property rights and a private land management system dependent on static boundaries and fixed fences. In examining …