A Balancing that is Beyond the Scope of the Common Law: A Discussion of the Issues Raised by Dobson v. (Litigation Guardian of) Dobson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines whether a child should have the legal right to sue its mother for harms alleged to have been caused by her negligence during pregnancy. The author begins with an overview of relevant jurisprudence on the legal status of the fetus and on the right of children to sue a third party for pre- birth injury. Jurisprudence on the right of a child to sue its mother for pre-birth injury is also outlined.\nThe author then critically examines the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Dobson (Litigation Guardian of) v Dobson where the court held, on public policy grounds, that a child did not have the legal right to sue its mother. In the author's view, this decision is correct given the limitations of the common law, although it does not appropriately balance the interests of pregnant women with those of injured children who require compensation for their special needs.\nShe advocates legislative reform because the legislature is better equipped to deal with polycentric issues and would be able to provide a particularized, results-oriented response. Specifically, the author recommends legislation, patterned on the United Kingdom's Congenital Disabilities Act, 1976, which would allow a child to sue its mother only where the alleged negligence relates to the operation of a motor vehicle. The author argues that such legislation is the best way to provide children like Ryan Dobson with the care they need, while avoiding the harmful consequences of imposing a general tort liability on pregnant women vis-a-vis their fetuses.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.041 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".