Conscientious participants and the ethical dimensions of physician support for legalised voluntary assisted dying

2020 ◽  
pp. medethics-2020-106702
Author(s):  
Jodhi Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Assisted Dying ◽  
Patient Access ◽  
Australian State ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The Law ◽  
Physician Support ◽  
First Time

The Australian state of Victoria legalised voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in June 2019. Like most jurisdictions with legalised VAD, the Victorian law constructs physicians as the only legal providers of VAD. Physicians with conscientious objection to VAD are not compelled to participate in the practice, requiring colleagues who are willing to participate to transact the process for eligible applicants. Physicians who provide VAD because of their active, moral and purposeful support for the law are known as conscientious participants. Conscientious participation has received scant attention in the bioethics literature. Patient access to VAD is contingent on the development of a sufficient corpus of conscientious participants in permissive jurisdictions. This article reports the findings of a small empirical study into how some Victorian physicians with no in-principle opposition towards the legalisation of VAD, are ethically orientating themselves towards the law, in the first 8 months of the law’s operation. It finds that in-principle-supportive physicians employ bioethical principles to justify their position but struggle to reconcile that approach with the broader medical profession’s opposition. This study is part of the first tranche of empirical research emerging from Australia since the legalisation of VAD in that country for the first time in over 20 years.

scholarly journals Junior doctors and conscientious objection to voluntary assisted dying: ethical complexity in practice

2021 ◽  
pp. medethics-2020-107125
Author(s):  
Rosalind J McDougall ◽  
Ben P White ◽  
Danielle Ko ◽  
Louise Keogh ◽  
Lindy Willmott
Keyword(s):  
Health Professionals ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Career Progression ◽  
Junior Doctors ◽  
Assisted Dying ◽  
Moral Integrity ◽  
Institutional Policies ◽  
Australian State ◽  
Specific Support ◽  
Ethical Complexity

In jurisdictions where voluntary assisted dying (VAD) is legal, eligibility assessments, prescription and administration of a VAD substance are commonly performed by senior doctors. Junior doctors’ involvement is limited to a range of more peripheral aspects of patient care relating to VAD. In the Australian state of Victoria, where VAD has been legal since June 2019, all health professionals have a right under the legislation to conscientiously object to involvement in the VAD process, including provision of information about VAD. While this protection appears categorical and straightforward, conscientious objection to VAD-related care is ethically complex for junior doctors for reasons that are specific to this group of clinicians. For junior doctors wishing to exercise a conscientious objection to VAD, their dependence on their senior colleagues for career progression creates unique risks and burdens. In a context where senior colleagues are supportive of VAD, the junior doctor’s subordinate position in the medical hierarchy exposes them to potential significant harms: compromising their moral integrity by participating, or compromising their career progression by objecting. In jurisdictions intending to provide all health professionals with meaningful conscientious objection protection in relation to VAD, strong specific support for junior doctors is needed through local institutional policies and culture.

scholarly journals Literatuurgeschiedschrijving én empirische literatuurwetenschap?

1970 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Daan Vandenhaute
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
First Time

The empirical study of literature might be tolerated as a discipline, withinliterary studies it remains an unknown, peripheral possibility, that has to dealwith a lot of scepticism and ignorance. Often it is associated with sheer quantitativeresearch, only focusing, moreover, on the contemporary. In this articleI try to show that the empirical approach also can be applied for the study ofliterary history, with attention paid to qualitative aspects. I demonstrate thisby means of empirical research I have done into the Swedish first time poetsof the 1970s. I point out that the empirical study of literature is conceived ofas a methodology that is applied within a specific theoretical framework, thesystemic study of literature.

Legal Theory for Legal Empiricists

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 292-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanoch Dagan ◽  
Roy Kreitner ◽  
Tamar Kricheli-Katz
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intellectual Labor ◽  
The Law ◽  
Widespread View ◽  
The Way

There is a widespread view that one does either theory or empirical work, and that theory and empiricism represent distant concerns, opposing worldviews, and perhaps distinct mentalities or personalities. This prevalent view has deep roots and is also the result of pragmatic and understandable tendencies toward division of intellectual labor. Against this view, this essay suggests that the relations between theory and empirical study ought to be understood as more intimate and that making legal theory an explicit focus can improve empirical scholarship. We pursue this claim by articulating a basis for legal theory and by showing how that basis illuminates both the application and design of empirical research on law. Legal theory, we argue, follows jurisprudence in interrogating the law as a set of coercive normative institutions. The upshot of this approach is a recognition that an interdisciplinary analysis of law must rely on both a theory (explicit or implicit) of the way law's power and its normativity align and an account of the way in which this discursive cohabitation manifests itself institutionally. We thus argue that legal theory is necessary in order to draw fruitfully on empirical research and further claim that legal theory provides guidance both for setting up an empirical research agenda on law and for designing research into specific topics.

scholarly journals Economic Dislocation and Contract Renegotiation in New Zealand and Japan: A Preliminary Empirical Study

1997 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
L Nottage
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Preliminary Results ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
The Law

This article reports on results so far from ongoing empirical research into attitudes and practices in New Zealand and Japan as to contract renegotiation in cases of extreme economic dislocation. It reports primarily on a survey administered to students in both countries. It adds some preliminary results from a more ambitious survey and follow-up interviews with companies; final results will follow in early 1997. In the interim, the article draws some possible implications for reform of the law of frustration of contract, and for legal theory more generally.

scholarly journals Does the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) Reflect Its Stated Policy Goals?

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben P White ◽  
Katrine Del Villar ◽  
Eliana Close ◽  
Lindy Willmott
Keyword(s):  
Advisory Panel ◽  
Assisted Dying ◽  
Panel Report ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
Australian State ◽  
The Law ◽  
Key Aspects

With the commencement of the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) in June 2019, Victoria became the first Australian State to permit voluntary assisted dying. This article considers the extent to which this novel Act reflects its stated policy goals. The first part of the article identifies the purported policy goals of the Act. This analysis draws on the explanatory material accompanying the law, in particular the expert Ministerial Advisory Panel Report which shaped the law. The article then critically evaluates the extent to which key aspects of the Act reflect those identified policy goals. Overall, the article concludes that the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) is not consistent with its policy goals in some important respects.

Buried Narratives: Exhuming the Mother's Story in Oliver Twist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Maternal Inheritance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
First Time ◽  
Critical Consideration

Initially, Oliver Twist (1839) might seem representative of the archetypal male social plot, following an orphan and finding him a place by discovering the father and settling the boy within his inheritance. But Agnes Fleming haunts this narrative, undoing its neat, linear transmission. This reconsideration of maternal inheritance and plot in the novel occurs against the backdrop of legal and social change. I extend the critical consideration of the novel's relationship to the New Poor Law by thinking about its reflection on the bastardy clauses. And here, of course, is where the mother enters. Under the bastardy clauses, the responsibility for economic maintenance of bastard children was, for the first time, legally assigned to the mother, relieving the father of any and all obligation. Oliver Twist manages to critique the bastardy clauses for their release of the father, while simultaneously embracing the placement of the mother at the head of the family line. Both Oliver and the novel thus suggest that it is the mother's story that matters, her name through which we find our own. And by containing both plots – that of the father and the mother – Oliver Twist reveals the violence implicit in traditional modes of inheritance in the novel and under the law.

Conscientious Objection (European and American approaches)

Law and World ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-144
Keyword(s):  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual

The Article concerns the legal issues, connected with the situation, when a person (or group of people) disobey requirements of the Law or other State regulations on the basis of religious or nonreligious belief. The Author analyses almost all related issues – whether imposing certain obligation on individuals, to which the individual has a conscientious objection based on his/her religious beliefs, always represents interference with his/her religion rights, and if it does, then what is subject of the interference – forum integrum or forum externum; whether neutral regulation, which does not refer to religion issues at all, could ever be regarded as interference into someone’s religious rights; whether opinion or belief, on which the individual’s objection and the corresponding conduct is based, must necesserily represent the clear “manifest” of the same religion or belief in order to gain legal protection; what is regarded as “manifest” of the religion or other belief in general and whether a close and direct link must exist between personal conduct and requirements of the religious or nonreligious belief; what are the criteria of the “legitimacy” of the belief; to what extent the following factors should be taken into consideration : whether the personal conduct of the individual represents the official requirements of corresponding religion or belief, what is the burden which was imposed on the believer’s religious or moral feelings by the State regulation, also, proportionality and degree of sincerity of the individual who thinks that his disobidience to the Law is required by his/her religious of philosofical belief. The effects (direct or non direct) of the nonfulfilment of the law requirement (legal responsibility, lost of the job, certain discomfort, etc..) are relevant factors as well. By the Author, all these circumstances and factors are essencial while estimating, whether it arises, actually, a real necessity and relevant obligation before a state for making some exemptions from the law to the benefi t of the conscientious objectors, in cases, if to predict such an objection was possible at all. So, the issues are discussed in the prism of the negative and positive obligations of a State. Corresponding precedents of the US Supreme Court and European Human Rights Court have been presented and analysed comparatively by the Author in the Article. The Article contains an important resume, in which the main points, principal issues and conclusion remarks are delivered. The Author shows, that due analysis of the legal aspects typical to “Conscientious objection” is very important for deep understanding religious rights, not absolute ones, and facilitates finding a correct answer on the question – how far do their boundaries go?

Assisted dying reframed in the context of English law’s approach to suicide

2020 ◽  
pp. 096853322098263
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Wicks
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Dying ◽  
Legal Duty ◽  
The Law

This article seeks to reframe the issue of assisted dying in terms of English law’s broader regulation of suicide. It identifies a long-standing ambiguity about the role of the law in respect of suicide, notwithstanding its decriminalisation in the Suicide Act 1961. Reviewing the passage of that Act and subsequent judicial and parliamentary involvement, the article identifies some pertinent unanswered questions such as whether suicide can ever be viewed as a legitimate exercise of autonomy; whether assistance in performing suicide should ever be lawful; and when exactly there is a legal duty on others to intervene to prevent a suicide. It is argued that until such questions are addressed directly in the broader context of suicide, the appropriate legal approach to assisted dying cannot be settled.

中國大陸內幕交易法介紹與刑事處罰實證研究：1997－2019

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (22) ◽  
pp. 103-185
Author(s):  
林建中 林建中 ◽  
李揚 李揚
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Insider Trading ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Relevant Research ◽  
Securities Law ◽  
Comprehensive Picture ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

內幕交易罪的處理，在證券法的發展歷史中，一直具有理論與實務上之重要意義。此一問題，在中國大陸相對初生但生猛且量體巨大的市場環境中如何被面對，從理論與比較法觀點，均具備特殊的研究價值。立法層面上，中國大陸法對於內幕交易的實體法構成，經二十多年的持續發展，已呈現出一定的複雜與完整面貌。然就執行層面視之，法院對於條文的理解與具體適用仍存在諸多爭議之處，同時，相關實證統計等資料的缺乏，也成為執行層面上對內幕交易罪研究的主要障礙之一。基於上述認識，本文立足於內幕交易刑事處罰執行層面的觀察，試圖呈現相關法律設計在中國大陸的司法實踐現狀。並通過1997年立法以來法院判決的實證研究，本文除一般性地檢驗內幕交易的執法情況外，同時針對法院在解釋犯罪構成上所呈現的爭議，進行進一步的評估。文中依照觀察面向的差異，特別鎖定三個重要的子議題：內幕信息的類型及其認定、被告「知悉」的司法判準、刑事處罰的比例性在內幕交易罪中的運用與體現。以上述實證研究結果為基礎，本文擬對於中國大陸內幕交易罪之司法執行效力提出評估，同時也補充性地可提供臺灣一定之參考。Insider trading has long been recognized as one of the key elements in modern securities law. As a massive but relatively young market, how China handles this issue is a topic rich in comparative value. On its face, the law and regulations prohibiting insider trading in securities transactions have already in place for more than two decades. However, their actual implementation, as well as how courts interpret the elements of insider trading offense in cases, are still obscure to outside observers. The lack of in-depth empirical investigation in its enforcement further creates an extra layer of complexity to the relevant research. Due to the problems mentioned above, this paper conducts an empirical study of the insider trading criminal cases, ranging from 1997 to 2019, to examine how insider trading cases are enforced in China. By observing the actual cases and their attributes, this paper presents a comprehensive picture of who commits insider trading law in China and how courts decide these cases. Three sub-set issues of the implementation are under special scrutiny:types of information and defendants; standard of proving defendant's scienter; and the relationship between sanction and illegal gain. Based on the results of this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of the enforcement on insider trading law in China in its first two decades of existence.

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