Biopower, juridical power and the afterlife of rights: Medical assistance in dying and the Supreme Court of Canada

Abstract

This article considers how different modalities of power emerge in medical assistance in dying (MAID) cases, particularly with respect to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (A.G.) [2015]. While juridical rationalities cast the issue of MAID in terms of individual rights, Carter and subsequent legislation distinguishes MAID from assisted suicide through the creation of a regulatory scheme, so that individuals seeking MAID continue to be governed by medical power. This may seem to confirm arguments that the image of subjectivity evoked by juridical discourses simply results in the reinforcement of existing power relations. However, this article argues that it is the very regulatory scheme governing MAID that provides points of resistance, giving the individual opportunities to challenge medical power in ways that may destabilize power relations.

Juridical Message in the Shadow of the Carceral: Prison Discipline, Additional Days and the Feasibility of Penal Communication

“…The second view over-emphasises the distinction between the two spheres. Such approach differentiates between the normative, moral, rule-bound, legalised juridical and the normalising, administrative, bureaucratic and technical carceral (Simon, 2017;Young, 2020). Theorists of this view often assume an 'immense gap between the worlds of sentencing and sentence administration' (Kerr, 2019: 96); understand sentencing as 'independent of the prison' (Minkkinen, 1997: 433); pose 'antagonism between juridical codes and disciplinary mechanisms' (Rose and Valverde, 1998: 548); or, argue that 'the prison system is distinguished from the discursive production of law', since 'the only significant way in which penal law [was] involved in the techniques of the prison was that it determined the sentence' (Tadros, 1998: 97;emphasis added).…”

“…1 More specifically, the paper seeks to explore the feasibility of the juridical logic, discourses and conceptions within the legal life of the carceral. We hope to bring to the core of the inquiry a more detailed understanding of the mechanics of penal power: how it is fragmented, diffused, negotiated, transmitted and 'translated' along the penal continuum (Foucault, 1977;Tadros, 1998;Young, 2020).…”