Voluntary Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide & Law Reform: A Sketch of the Canadian Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper outlines the recent Canadian experience of replacing the blanket prohibition of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia with a new regulatory regime for “medical assistance in dying”. The aim is to illustrate how lawmakers in Canada have pursued the project that the Italian Constitutional Court has urged Italy’s parliament to undertake. Thus, the paper traces the arguments behind this law reform, highlighting ongoing disagreements over the manner in which it reconciles the protection of constitutional rights and the pursuit of particular policy objectives. Of course, the constitutional structures, political dynamics, medical cultures, and legal systems of these two countries differ in potentially salient ways. This paper is not a case for substituting Canada’s MAID regime for Italy’s current end-of-life laws whole cloth. Instead, the goal is to signal ways of thinking about, and responding to, some of the more pressing and difficult challenges to which efforts at law reform in this area may give rise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".