Jocelyn Downie

Jocelyn Downie is Professor Emerita in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at Dalhousie University and an Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Health Law Research. Her work on end-of-life law and policy includes: author of Dying Justice: A Case for the Decriminalizing Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide in Canada; and member of the Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel on End-of-Life Decision-Making, the plaintiffs’ legal team in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), the Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group on Physician-Assisted Dying, and the Canadian Council of Academies Expert Panel on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). She is currently a member of the legal teams in a Charter challenge to institutional religious obstruction of access to MAiD and a Charter challenge to the exclusion from eligibility for MAiD of persons with mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. She was named a member of the Order of Canada in part in recognition of her work advocating for high-quality, end-of-life care.