Gillick, bone marrow and teenagers

The Human Tissue Authority can authorise a bone marrow harvest on a child of any age if a person with parental responsibility consents to the procedure. Older children have the legal capacity to consent to medical procedures under Gillick, but it is unclear if Gillick can be applied to non-therapeutic medical procedures. The relevant donation guidelines state that the High Court shall be consulted in the event of a disagreement, but what is in the best interests of the teenage donor under s.1 of the Children Act 1989? There are no legal authorities on child bone marrow harvests in the United Kingdom. This article considers the best interests of the older saviour sibling and questions whether, for the purposes of welfare, the speculative benefits could outweigh the physical burdens

Children's bodies: the battleground for their rights?

The UNCRC has changed profoundly ideas about adult/child relationships and there is now an acknowledgment in both law and policy that children have a right to be consulted and to participate in decisions made about their lives. This has been widely discussed and critiqued and one of the most significant battlegrounds for debate has been children’s rights to consent or refuse medical treatment and the issue of exactly who has the right to control children’s bodies. This article will compare several cases where the English and Scottish courts have made various decisions and rulings about the extent to which children do have rights to control their bodies. It will question why, twenty years after the UK ratified the UNCRC, children are still considered incompetent in matters concerning their own bodies, unless proved otherwise, while adults are automatically considered competent unless shown not to be and will analyse whether this situation is compatible with a children’s rights agenda

Re L (A child) (Contact: Domestic violence): Commentary by Christine Piper, Judgement by Felicity Kaganas

The full and final version of this article is available in the published book.This is an judgment in a book of feminist judgments. It is an alternative judgment, written from a feminist perspective, of a leading decision setting out the approach to be adopted in cases of disputed child contact in cases involving allegations of domestic violence. It aims to provide a challenge to the reasoning of the judges in that case and to demonstrate that a different perspective could have led to different reasoning that would have better protected the interests of women and children

Mental Capacity and Decisional Autonomy: An Interdisciplinary Challenge

With the waves of reform occurring in mental health legislation in England and other jurisdictions, mental capacity is set to become a key medico-legal concept. The concept is central to the law of informed consent and is closely aligned to the philosophical concept of autonomy. It is also closely related to mental disorder. This paper explores the interdisciplinary terrain where mental capacity is located. Our aim is to identify core dilemmas and to suggest pathways for future interdisciplinary research. The terrain can be separated into three types of discussion: philosophical, legal and psychiatric. Each discussion approaches mental capacity and judgmental autonomy from a different perspective yet each discussion struggles over two key dilemmas: whether mental capacity and autonomy is/should be a moral or a psychological notion and whether rationality is the key constitutive factor. We suggest that further theoretical work will have to be interdisciplinary and that this work offers an opportunity for the law to enrich its interpretation of mental capacity, for psychiatry to clarify the normative elements latent in its concepts and for philosophy to advance understanding of autonomy through the study of decisional dysfunction. The new pressures on medical and legal practice to be more explicit about mental capacity make this work a priority

Scaling limit of fluctuations in stochastic homogenization

We investigate the global fluctuations of solutions to elliptic equations with random coefficients in the discrete setting. In dimension $d\geq 3$ and for i.i.d.\ coefficients, we show that after a suitable scaling, these fluctuations converge to a Gaussian field that locally resembles a (generalized) Gaussian free field. The paper begins with a heuristic derivation of the result, which can be read independently and was obtained jointly with Scott Armstrong.Comment: 27 pages, revised version with a new section obtained jointly with Scott Armstron

Sexual orientation and family law

On 29th March 2000 the Scottish Parliament passed its fifth piece of legislation, the Adults with Incapacities (Scotland) Act 2000. One small provision tucked away in this important legislation amends the definition of "nearest relative" in the Mental Health (Scotland) Act 1984, in order to include within that phrase members of conjugal same-sex couples1. The relative obscurity of this provision must not hide its import, for this is the first time that legislation anywhere in the United Kingdom has expressly and intentionally given recognition, for civil law purposes, to the existence of same-sex family relationships

Grandparents and contact: 'rights v welfare' revisited

This article examines the legal position of members of the extended family involved in contact (access) disputes and locates the discussion within the debate about the utility of rights in resolving such disputes. In particular it focuses on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and also refers to the jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court

Computing with rational symmetric functions and applications to invariant theory and PI-algebras

Let the formal power series f in d variables with coefficients in an arbitrary field be a symmetric function decomposed as a series of Schur functions, and let f be a rational function whose denominator is a product of binomials of the form (1 - monomial). We use a classical combinatorial method of Elliott of 1903 further developed in the Partition Analysis of MacMahon in 1916 to compute the generating function of the multiplicities (i.e., the coefficients) of the Schur functions in the expression of f. It is a rational function with denominator of a similar form as f. We apply the method to several problems on symmetric algebras, as well as problems in classical invariant theory, algebras with polynomial identities, and noncommutative invariant theory.Comment: 37 page