Winning Conditions for Charter Reconsideration: Assisted Suicide and the Supreme Court of Canada
Date
2015-07-24
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
In February 2015, the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s prohibition of physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Not only did the Carter decisions mark a historic point in the long fight to legalize PAS in Canada, but it was also the second Supreme Court case in a little over a year to revisit, and depart from, an earlier Charter precedent. Stare decisis, or precedent, is a fundamental doctrine of the legal system that judges are reluctant to ignore. However, in Bedford, the Supreme Court outlined new criteria for revisiting a precedential decision, and these same criteria allowed for the success of Carter fourteen months later. The Supreme Court is taking a new approach to stare decisis, and this thesis used the PAS movement and Carter as a case study to explore the winning conditions for precedent reversal.
Description
Keywords
Political Science
Citation
Ogilvie, C. (2015). Winning Conditions for Charter Reconsideration: Assisted Suicide and the Supreme Court of Canada (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28714