More salient in the era of Covid-19, the question of physicians’ obligations to safeguard the health of non-patients continually vexes courts, scholars, and policymakers. Physicians’ public health duties are confoundingly elusive. Elusive in the sense that while at times affirming physicians’ special capacity and obligations to improve the health of the community, the law more often obscures physicians’ public health duties with ad hoc recognition and insufficient theorization. These public health duties also are elusive in actual application. Physicians can point to individual patient duties as reasons to evade compliance with certain public health laws or to discount public health considerations in clinical decision-making. As a matter of health policy, the law’s directive to “put patients first” has underappreciated costs. It frequently overrides physicians’ more elusive public health duties in ways that facilitate externalization of health risks to the public. This paper analyzes the Covid-19 pandemic, antibiotic resistance, infectious disease reporting, the opioid crisis, and gun violence as disturbing examples. Amplifying physicians’ public health duties to require that they pay greater heed to the population’s health, even to the detriment of doing all possible for their individual patients, seems unavoidably necessary. The nation’s public health system largely depends upon non-governmental actors, and private physicians are at the center of this public/private response. The private physician occupies a unique strategic role embedded between her patient, other patients, and society and performs critical sentinel, gatekeeper, and learned intermediary functions that are indispensable to effective public health protection.

The pressure to collect more health data and use that data more effectively is mounting as healthcare systems face greater challenges. However, the risks of increasing health data collection and making our health data work harder are myriad. Given that ‘good outcomes’ in relation to health data usage will be context specific and temporally contingent, the emphasis here is on fit-for-purpose instruments and good practice, acknowledging that health data usage is mediated not only through law, but also through governance structures around data resources themselves. This chapter therefore reviews the Canadian health data ecosystem, examining its federal and provincial legislative elements (with an emphasis on Nova Scotia). It then critiques that ecosystem, bearing in mind the needs of learning healthcare systems. In doing so, it highlights four ecosystem shortcomings, which are grounded in no small part on the perceived competition between private and public interests, and the poor alignment between contemporary data uses and traditional protections associated with autonomy (consent) and privacy (anonymisation). Finally, it offers some key considerations for ecosystem design, addressing specifically social license to operate and the value foundation of both legislation and repository governance instruments.

Many jurisdictions require lawyers to advise clients about mediation. As gatekeepers of the process, lawyers have duties to fulfil before the mediation starts, during the process and when it ends. There are ethical considerations that mediators must consider and potential legal liability to bear in mind. While it is important to distinguish between acting as a lawyer and as a mediator to ensure there is no conflict of roles, the two roles can also have a symbiotic relationship. Observing the work of lawyers in mediation from a detached perspective is beneficial, as opportunities arise to see behaviours that are counter-productive and behaviours that are constructive. This acquaints a lawyer with a variety of ways to respond to difficult behaviours by clients or opposing counsel that can help in meeting the parties’ substantive needs. Mediation has been instrumental in the emergence of the ‘new lawyer’ – a professional who has a greater focus on the potential for interest-based bargaining and problem solving, and accepts the value of non-legal solutions to legal problems. The flexibility of the mediation process can also facilitate expert involvement in a non-adversarial way.

In Chapter 3 – The Social Construction of the Individual Human Being – A Conceptual and a Theoretical Framework – I develop and employ a conceptual and theoretical framework based on feminist and critical constructivist IR approaches and approaches from International Law. To this end, the chapter brings together building blocks drawn from these approaches: gender and body, norms and language, participants and positions, rights and duties, and human rights. The chapter demonstrates the advancement the framework makes possible. Furthermore, it provides evidence for the value each of the approaches and concepts adds to the frameworks and the analysis.

A presentation of the concluding remarks and main submissions on the issues discussed in Chapters 1 to 6 of the book.

Chapter 7 recapitulates how Chapters 3 to 6 demonstrate that charity controllers are subject to a range of duties and mechanisms that ensure some regard be given to both present and future potential benefit recipients but that those duties and mechanisms largely lack a normative benchmark, such as intergenerational justice, to determine the timing of benefit distribution. Chapter 7 thus examines whether intergenerational justice could act as a normative basis for charity controllers’ choices about how to allocate benefits between current and future generations. It also considers the role that efficiency might play in such decision-making. The chapter then investigates the practicalities of attempting to incorporate principles of intergenerational justice into rules that constrain charity accumulation. Both general issues of practicality and specific reform options are considered. The aim is to better incorporate a normative basis for benefit distribution while at the same time protecting the potential benefits from accumulation and retaining consistency with the goals of charity law. Examples are drawn from the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

This chapter examines whether there are meaningful differences between human rights and humanitarianism in terms of perfect and imperfect duties, and concludes that this is a false parallel and that increasingly humanitarianism and human rights are blurring the distinction between the two in terms of their practices.

This chapter examines the appointment, retirement and capacity of trustees. They are initially appointed under the trust instrument by the settlor but provision must be made for their replacement. The settlor can reserve the power to appoint new trustees in the trust instrument, alternatively a named person may have the power. There is a statutory power to appoint where no provision has been made by the settlor and the appointment may be made by the surviving or continuing trustees. On rare occasions appointment can be made by the court or by the beneficiaries. Anyone with legal capacity can be appointed as a trustee although a minor cannot be a trustee of land. Professional trustees are sometimes appointed. There is no limit on the number of trustees for a trust of personalty but for trusts of land the limit is four. The Trustee Act 1925 provides for when a trustee can retire or be removed. Trustees are not usually paid but in some circumstances payment is made subject to provisions in the common law or the Trustee Act 2000. This act widened the circumstances when remuneration will be made to the trustees.

Scottish moral philosophy was two-sided, concerned partly with the human propensity to certain types of behaviour, partly with our ability to appreciate the moral worth of such behaviour in ourselves and in others. The behavioural aspect seen as – and sometimes called – practical ethics, while the concern with moral judgment was considered to be purely metaphysical and part of the theory of the mind. Natural jurisprudence was the central part of practical ethics that dealt with the virtue of justice understood as the sum of our duties and associated rights, and a central task for this intellectual and academic discipline was to explain why some parts of justice were distinguished from the rest of the virtues by being the subject of the institutions of justice, namely adjudication, law and legislation. All the Scottish thinkers saw themselves as Newtonians concerned with the empirical demonstration of the regularities of the physical and the moral realms, most of them (Hutcheson, Turnbull, the Moderates, the Common Sense thinkers) taking these regularities to be evidence of a divinely instituted order and purpose in the world. Hume and Smith took a different view of the metaphysics of moral and hence of moral science and natural jurisprudence.