The article analyzes the recent ruling of the Italian Constitutional Court amending article 580 of the Italian Criminal Code, relating to aid and incitement to suicide. According to the first Assize Court of Milan, article 580, conceived in 1930, reflects the fascist culture of its author. The problem of the Constitutional Court was therefore to establish whether a democratic state can still place limits on aid for suicide and in what terms it can do so.

Ethical issues raised by the outbreak of COVID-19 have predominantly been addressed through a public health ethics lens. This article proposes that the rising COVID-19 fatalities and the World Health Organization’s failure to include palliative care as part of its guidance on how to maintain essential health services during the pandemic have exposed palliative care as an underlying global crisis. It therefore calls for a different ethical framework that includes a care ethics perspective and thereby addresses the ways in which the pandemic has triggered new difficulties in ensuring the delivery of appropriate end-of-life care for the dying. The article analyses the structural weaknesses of palliative care accentuated by the pandemic and proposes solutions that could set in motion lasting changes in the way it is delivered beyond COVID-19.

This response takes as its starting point the twofold agenda Winfried Siemerling pursues in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: his systematic outline of a history of Black writing in Canada from the eighteenth century to the present and his goal to fill a geographical gap in Paul Gilroy’s influential concept of the Black Atlantic, thereby also offering a reconsideration of this concept. I suggest that, although Siemerling is clearly successful with regard to the first aspect, he is only partially so with regard to the second, with the logic of a nation-based literary history to some extent countering the agenda of the constitutive transnationality of the Black Atlantic. This tension between the two agendas, I suggest, results in crucial questions concerning the complex relationship among the national, the transnational, and the diasporic in the specific logic of literary histories.

Given a strong family history of early heart attacks, the future has always been an iffy proposition. Miraculously, I have bypassed the early off-ramps and find myself approaching 80, stents in place, considering the very real but previously unimaginable possibility of still more. But what kind of more? With dopamine on the wane and no longer supercharged by the push and shove of unbridled ambition and pride, bigger and grander are out of the question. Tired clichés poke through the widening cracks in my thinking to become uninvited bulletins of compromise and consolation. Be grateful. Relax, reminisce, enjoy sunsets, learn the backyard birds’ names, maybe even sing to them, and count blessings.

In this response to the incisive and stimulating discussions by Karina Vernon, Robert S. Levine, Barrington Walker, and Katja Sarkowsky of The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, I focus on the dynamic dimensions of Black Canadian and Black Atlantic time-spaces and temporalities, as well as issues of public, institutional, and pedagogical inclusion, incorporation, recognition, and transformation. In addition, questions of history and its uses, social aesthetics, and contrapuntal national/transnational frameworks are brought to the fore, often with reference to specific texts, to reflect on Black Canadian cultural achievement and its transnational and diasporic contexts both past and present.

Mackenzie Graham has made an important contribution to the literature on decisionmaking for patients with disorders of consciousness. He argues, and I agree, that decisions for unresponsive patients who are known to retain some degree of covert awareness ought to focus on current interests, since such patients likely retain the kinds of mental capacities that in ordinary life command our current respect and attention. If he is right, then it is not appropriate to make decisions for such patients by appealing to the values they had in the past, either the values expressed in an advance directive or the values recalled by a surrogate. There are two things I wish to add to the discussion. My first point is somewhat critical, for although I agree with his general conclusion about how, ideally, such decisions should be approached, I remain skeptical about whether his conclusion offers decisionmakers real practical help. The problem with these cases is that the evidence we have about the nature of the patient’s current interests is minimal or nonexistent. However—and this is important—Graham’s conclusion will be extremely relevant if in the future, our ability to communicate with such patients improves, as I hope it will. This leads to my second point. Graham’s conclusion illustrates a more general problem with our standard framework for decisionmaking for previously competent patients, a problem that has not been adequately recognized. So, in what follows, I explain the problem I see and offer some brief thoughts about solutions.

This paper works with methodologies offered by Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (2015) to elaborate the complexities involved in conversations between the fields of Canadian Literature and Black Canadian cultural studies. As Siemerling argues, Black Canadian literature is marked by the transversal time-spaces of the Black Atlantic which run counter to linear national time. What are the implications, then, of the Black Atlantic’s incommensurable time-spaces in the ongoing project of institutionalizing Black Canadian literature?

This article presents and evaluates the legal thought of Muhammad ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (1910–1974) with a focus on his discourse on the objectives of Sharīʿa and the motives behind his reformulation of these objectives within the broader context of his political agenda. Al-Fāsī's concerns were not purely academic. As a political leader who struggled for the independence of his country and as a decision maker within the newly established Moroccan state, his theorization of Islamic law departed from traditional and modern efforts to negotiate the supposed status of Sharīʿa within the institutional structures of postcolonial Muslim states. The questions engaged in this article are to what extent did al-Fāsī's contribution to Maqāṣid go beyond its classical reformulations as represented by the Andalusian Māliki jurist Ibrāhīm Ibn Mūsā Abū Isḥāq al-Shāṭibī (d. AH 790/1388 CE) in his seminal work, Al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Sharīʿa, and whether al-Fāsī's work represents a turn in the field of Maqāṣid when compared with that of other modern Muslim jurists, among them Muhammad al-Ṭāhir Ibn ʿĀshūr (1886–1970). This article focuses on al-Fāsī's book on Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa, Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya wa Makārimuhā, and its contribution to the ongoing efforts to accommodate Islamic law within the corpus of modern secular laws.