This thesis charts and explores the effects of a basic socio-political logic of English and Canadian case law on assisted dying. It focuses specifically on a problematic paternalism within such law and questions why judicial decisions consistently refuse to recognize so-called 'compassionate motives' for assisted death. When one ventures beyond judicial ratios, focusing instead on cases as discourses in relation to wider power-knowledge relations, one glimpses how law helps to shape and support

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... a political rationality of neoliberalism in explicit and subtle ways. In particular, an analysis reveals how specific cases draw on concepts such as enmity, vulnerability, inviolability of persons, security of persons and of society, dignity and dependency, which feed two legal fictionsimmune persons and an immune society -that reflect the individualizing, privatizing and divisive ethos of a neoliberal rationality. Referring to Esposito's