Robert J. Currie

Regulatory and medico-legal barriers to interprofessional practice.

Unlike the other contributions to this issue, this paper is concerned with the prospects and potential ramifications of implementing interprofessional practice from the legal standpoint. The authors focus on the two forums where the major legal issues are likely to be played out: the laws under which health care professionals are regulated; and the law of professional malpractice as applied by the courts under the tort of negligence. The goal is to examine the regulatory and medico-legal barriers that might prevent or inhibit health care professionals from working together on an interprofessional basis, and to forecast the kinds of changes within legal systems which will be necessary to accommodate the change. The first part of the paper focuses on the legal regimes which govern the Canadian health care system, and argues that the essential integrity of the system of professional self-regulation must be protected in programs of reform that seek to create space for interprofessional practice. The authors also propose a number of specific initiatives of review and legislative change as examples of the role that legal reform can play in the shift to a culture of interprofessional regulation. The second part of the paper focuses on malpractice law and suggests that, while in the long term the superior quality of care brought about by interprofessional practice should produce less liability, in the short term interprofessional practice may fit uneasily within the legal constructs traditionally employed by the courts to evaluate malpractice claims. The authors propose three strategies designed to minimize this risk.

R. v. Munyaneza : Pondering Canada's First Core Crimes Conviction

Canada recently completed its first genocide trial, which resulted in the conviction of the Rwandan accused, Desire Munyaneza, for crimes committed during the Rwandan genocide. While the case is still under appeal, it represents a significant success for Canada’s relatively new core crimes legislation, the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, and was the first prosecution undertaken pursuant to that law. Drawing upon the Munyaneza case, the authors analyze the legislation and evaluate its effectiveness. They conclude that the model is an effective one that both bodes well for Canada’s future participation in the battle against impunity, and provides a model upon which other states might wish to draw.

The Contextualised Court: Litigating ‘Culture’ in Canada:

This article surveys the manner in which the courts of Canada have treated the concept of ‘culture’ as a justiciable matter in litigation. It starts from the premise that a constitutionally ‘multicultural’ society has manifest impetus to factor cultural realities into court-based decision-making, and acknowledges that judicial use of ‘contextualism’ appears to have provided the framework for reception of cultural evidence. Using the rules of evidence as a lens, the article: surveys how courts have found culture to be relevant, material and admissible in various kinds of legal disputes; analyses the trends; and offers some preliminary thoughts as to how the law of evidence should continue to adapt in order to accommodate culture in a principled manner.