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Jocelyn Downie

Professor Emeritus Faculties of Law and Medicine; Adjunct Professor, Australian Centre for Health Law Research - QUT

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Schulich School of Law , Dalhousie Health Justice Institute

Email: jocelyn.downie@dal.ca
Mailing Address:

Weldon Law Building, 6061 University Avenue
PO Box 15000 Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2

Research Topics:

Health law
Health care ethics
Health policy
End-of-life law and policy

Education

BA Philosophy (Queen's University)
MA Philosophy (Queen's University)
MLitt Philosophy (The University of Cambridge)
LLB (The University of Toronto)
LLM (The University of Michigan)
SJD (The University of Michigan)

Bar admission

Nova Scotia, 2000

Selected awards & honours

Recent publications

Eliana Close and Jocelyn Downie, “Assisted Dying in Canada” in Ben White (ed.) Law and Assisted Dying Handbook (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2025).
Ruthie Jeanneret, Eliana Close, Jocelyn Downie, Lindy Willmott, and Ben White, “‘My advocacy is not about me, my advocacy is about Canadians’: A qualitative study of how caregivers and patients influence regulation of medical assistance in dying in Canada” Medical Law Review, 2024.
Eliana Close, Ruthie Jeanneret, Jocelyn Downie, Lindy Wilmott, and Ben White, “A qualitative study of institutional objection of medical assistance in dying: ongoing challenges and catalysts for change” 24(1) BMC Medical Ethics, 2023.
Jocelyn Downie, “The Value of a Feminist Approach in the Ethics of End of Life Care” in Vikki Entwistle and Wendy Rogers , eds., Routledge Handbook of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).
Jocelyn Downie, Mona Gupta, Stefano Cavalli, Samuel Blouin, “Assistance in Dying: A comparative look at legal definitions” 46(7) Death Studies 2022, 1547-1556.
Jocelyn Downie, “From Prohibition to Permission: The Winding Road of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada”, 34:4 HEC Forum 321-354.
Ben White, Lindy Willmott, Katrine Del Villar, Jayne Hewitt, Eliana Close, Laura Ley Greaves, James Cameron, Rebecca Meehan, Jocelyn Downie, “Who is Eligible for Voluntary Assisted Dying” Nine Medical Conditions Assessed Against Five Legal Frameworks” (2022) 45:1 UNSW Law Journal 401-444.
Jocelyn Downie and Kate Scallion, “From Rodriguez to Carter to Bill C-14: Lessons learned from Canada’s journey to legal medical assistance in dying” in Ben While and Lindy Willmott, eds., International Perspectives on End-of-Life Reform: Politics, Persuasion and Persistence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Gina Bravo, Lieve Van den Block, Jocelyn Downie, Marcel Arcand, and Lise Trottier, “Attitudes toward withholding antibiotics from people with dementia lacking decisional capacity: findings from a survey of Canadian stakeholders” (2021) 22:119 BMC Med Ethics.
Udo Schuklenk and Jocelyn Downie, “Social determinants of health and slippery slopes in assisted dying debates: Lessons from Canada” (2021) Journal of Medical Ethics.
Ben White, Lindy Willmott, Eliana Close, and Jocelyn Downie, “Legislative Options to Address Institutional Objections to Voluntary Assisted Dying in Australia” (2021) 3 UNSW Law Journal Forum 1-19.
Ben White, Lindy Willmott, Jocelyn Downie, Andrew Geddis, and Colin Gavaghan, “Assisted dying and evidence-based law-making: a critical analysis of an article’s role in New Zealand’s referendum” (2020) 133:1520 New Zealand Medical Journal 83-90.
Adeline Iftene and Jocelyn Downie, “End-of-Life Care for Federally Incarcerated Individuals in Canada” (2020) 14:1 McGill Journal of Law and Health 1-50.

Dalhousie University

Schulich School of Law

Jocelyn Downie

Professor Emeritus Faculties of Law and Medicine; Adjunct Professor, Australian Centre for Health Law Research - QUT

Connect with me

Education

Bar admission

Selected awards & honours

Recent publications

Current service & activity

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