R. Blake Brown

A trying question : the jury in nineteenth-century Canada

The jury, a central institution of the trial process, exemplifies in popular perception the distinctiveness of our legal tradition. Nevertheless, juries today try only a small minority of cases. A Trying Question traces the history of the jury in Canada and links its nineteenth-century decline to the rise of the professional class. R. Blake Brown shows that juries could be controversial, as they could be stacked and were often considered a nuisance by those who had to serve. With the legal professions expansion, many saw them as amateur, ineffective, and unnecessarily expensive bodies that ought to be supplanted by those trained to sift through and correctly interpret evidence. A Trying Questions fascinating history outlines the ways in which lay people became less involved in Canadas legal system and illustrates how judges, rather than jurors drawn from the community, would come to find verdicts in most court cases.

Compensation for Gamete Donation: The Analogy with Jury Duty

In Canada, laws and policies consistently reject the commodification of human organs and tissues, and Canadian practice is consistent with international standards in this regard. Until the Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) Act of 2004, gamete donation in Canada was an exception: Canadians could pay and be paid open market rates for gametes (sperm and egg) for use in in vitro fertilization (IVF). As sections of the AHR Act forbidding payment for gametes (Section 6) and permitting only reimbursement of receipted expenses (Section 12) gradually came into effect in 2005, Canada did away with this anomaly. Medical practice and legal prohibitions in assisted human reproduction are now consistent with other areas of medicine where tissues and organs are taken from one person to benefit others: Altruistic donation, rather than selling and buying, will be the norm. The authors thank Francoise Baylis, Jocelyn Downie, and members of the Novel Tech Ethics Research Team at Dalhousie University for their assistance with and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank Tim Krahn for assistance in formatting this paper.