I. Doctoral theses / theses de doctorat.

• Position: Thesis Survey/Recension des theses

V. Obijiofor Aginam, Salvaging the Global Neighbourhood: Multilateralism and Public Health Challenges in a Divided World, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia.

This thesis explores the relevance of international law in the multilateral protection and promotion of public health in a world sharply divided by poverty and underdevelopment. In this endeavour, the thesis predominantly uses the concept of "mutual vulnerability" to discuss the globalisation of diseases and health hazards in the emergent global neighbourhood. Because pathogens do not respect geo-political boundaries, this thesis argues that the world has become one single germ pool where there is no health sanctuary.

The concept of mutual vulnerability postulates that the irrelevance or obsolescence of national boundaries to microbial threats has created the capability to immerse all of humanity in a single microbial sea. It follows, therefore, that neither protectionism nor isolationism offers any effective defences against advancing microbial forces. As a result, the thesis argues that contemporary multilateral health initiatives should be driven primarily by enlightened self-interest as opposed to parochial protectionist policy.

This study is primarily situated within the discipline of international law. Nonetheless, it draws on the social sciences in its analysis of traditional medicine in Africa. It also makes overtures to medical historians in its discussion of the attitudes of societies to diseases and to the evolution of public health diplomacy, to international relations in its analysis of international regime theories, and to a number of other disciplines interested in the phenomenon of globalisation. This interdisciplinary framework for analysis offers a holistic approach to public health policy-making and scholarship to counter the segmented approaches of the present era. Thus, this thesis is concerned with four related projects.

First, it explores the relevance of legal interventions in the promotion and protection of public health. If health is a public good, legal interventions are indispensable intermediate strategies to deliver the final dividends of good health to the vulnerable and the poor in all societies.

Second, it explores multicultural approaches to health promotion and protection and argues for a humane health order based on multicultural inclusiveness and multi-stakeholder participation in health-policy making. Using African traditional malaria therapies as a case study, the thesis urges an animation of transnational civil society networks to evolve a humane health order, one that fulfils the desired vision of harmony and fairness.

Third, it makes an argument for increased collaboration among lawyers, epidemiologists and scholars of other disciplines related to public health. Using the tenets of health promotion and primary health care, the thesis urges an inter-disciplinary dialogue to facilitate the needed "epidemiological transition" across societies, especially in the developing world.

Fourth, the thesis makes modest proposals towards the reduction of unequal disease burdens within and among nation-states.

The thesis articulates these proposals generically under the rubric of communitarian globalism, a paradigm that strives to meet the lofty ideals of the "law of humanity". In sum, it projects a humane world where all of humanity is inexorably tied in a global compact, where the health of one person rises and falls with the health of every other person, and where every country sees the health problems of other countries as its own.

Arduous as these tasks may be, they are achievable only if damaged trust of past decades is rebuilt. Because the Westphalian sovereign states lack the full capacity to exhaustively pursue all the dynamics of communitarian globalism, multilateral governance structures must necessarily extend to both state and non-state actors. In this quest, the thesis concludes, international law--with its bold claims to universal protection of human rights and the enhancement of human dignity---is indispensable as a mechanism for reconstructing the public health trust in the relations of nations and of peoples.

Mary Rachel Ariss, The Recycled Fetus: Ethics of Waste and Girl Exchange in New Reproductive Technologies, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.

The goal of this thesis is to expose and analyze the ethical problems of the proposed use of fetal ovarian tissue as a source of donor eggs for infertility treatment, from an embodied, feminist ethical perspective. Fetal ovarian tissue is taken from an aborted fetus and used to help another woman become pregnant. An ethical analysis of this use must begin by considering the construction of pregnancy in the powerful discourses of medicine and law. Medical discourse constructs pregnant women as fetal containers. Legal regulation of pregnant women normalizes and enforces this status. Medical discourse further constructs female reproduction as wasteful. Fetal tissue, and other reproductive tissues, are medically understood as waste. This classification makes their use, which this thesis argues is akin to recycling, appear ethically acceptable.

The drive to recycle fetal ovarian tissue reflects a pervasive inability to accept loss in medical technoscience and modern Western culture. Recycling fetal ovarian tissue elevates the biological building blocks of life, or "life itself" over individual lived lives. In a society which already devalues people based on social characteristics such as gender, race and class, the elevation of "life itself" will further devalue these lived lives. Recycling has further implications: it destroys the work of memory and forgetting; it provides redemption for abortion thus confirming the success of the American antiabortion movement in establishing it as a "bad" act; and it helps medical technoscience, as a cultural system in itself, to manage the problem of death. Currently, human tissue donation is ethically acceptable only when it is given and received as a gift. This thesis argues that giving and the girl relationship do not transform the waste and recycling aspects of fetal ovarian tissue use into an ethical process; rather, they disguise this utilitarian approach to fetal ovarian tissue and women seeking abortions.

Women's ethical work in remembering, forgetting and narrating abortion stories is lost in the drive to recycle fetal ovarian tissue. The recycled fetus is an unethical gift.

Donald Joseph Auger, The Northern Ojibwe and Their Family Law, Osgoode Hall Law School.

This dissertation provides information about the laws or rules used by a group of Northern Ojibwe, particularly the family laws of marriage, divorce, adoption and child cafe. It is also a story about how the legal institutions of Euro-Canadian culture have viewed the family laws of aboriginal groups around the country. In the dissertation the idea of large house and a small house is used as a metaphor to discuss the differences between the ways in which the Euro-Canadian society and the Northern Ojibwe view family law.

The materials used in this dissertation are drawn from a large body of historical, ethnographic, anthropological, and legal materials. Historical and ethnographic accounts about the Ojibwe people, as well as local histories and government reports are reviewed, or referred to. The legal materials are drawn from case commentary, legal articles and groups of cases from each of the legal areas discussed. However the bulk of the material comes from interview data collected from members of the various families of Ojibwe people in the study area.

Family law among the study group does not exist as a separate entity. It is inextricably woven into the fabric of the culture. It is a part of all other aspects of the culture. It is holistic. To discuss family law is to discuss all other aspects of the culture: the whole system of beliefs, spiritual beliefs, the economy, kinship ties, economic ties, community, and social relations. The rules of interpersonal relations among the Northern Ojibwe contain a number of key concepts that affect how issues related to the family are dealt with. These key concepts include, inter alia, pimadizewin, kinship, respect, sharing, and caring for.

If there is to be anything learned from this dissertation it is that the Northern Ojibwe do have family laws. Members of the study group say their family laws have been used by them and their forbears for as long as they can remember and have served them well. It seems reasonable to them that they should continue to use these laws alongside Euro-Canadian laws.

Ige Bolodeoku, Corporation as a Nexus of Gradational Jural (Power) Relations: A Theoretical Predicate for the Shareholder Primacy Norm, Osgoode Hall Law School.

This thesis is a contribution to the theoretical literature on corporate governance and corporate relationships. It proposes that the corporation is a "nexus of gradational jural relations," and that the jural relational components in each subset of intracorporate relationships are key foundations to the powers, rights and responsibilities that the corporation, shareholders, directors, management and other primary stakeholders claim or may claim. Specifically, it conceptualizes the act of incorporation as a jural act conferring distinct claims, powers and duties on the corporation, the shareholders and board of directors. With the jural relational framework, I argue in this thesis that the...