Santa Clara University School of Law Center for Social Justice and Public Service presents “California Faces End of Life Choice: Legal Issues and the Contemporary Controversy,” Friday, Oct 28, 2005 from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm in Bannan Hall, room 142, with a reception following the symposium. Three hours of MCLE credit is available by attending the symposium.
In 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to recognize the claimed constitutional rights of competent, terminally ill adults to control circumstances of death and invited experimentation at the state level. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997). The Court recognized that “[t]hroughout the Nation, Americans are engaged in an earnest and profound debate about the morality, legality, and practicality of physician-assisted suicide. Our holding permits this debate to continue, as it should in a democratic society.” 521 U.S. at 735. That debate has continued in the states in the form of legislative initiatives, popular referenda, and state constitutional challenges. The California legislature currently is considering legislation, modeled on Oregon’s Death with Dignity Law, to allow physicians to assist dying for competent, terminally ill adults. Compassion in dying highlights several themes.
In 1997, when the Supreme Court decided Glucksburg, states threatened criminal sanctions against doctors or others who helped competent, terminally ill people hasten death. Since then, Oregon’s Death with Dignity Law has allowed doctors to help people control the circumstances of death. Each year the Oregon Department of Health provides extensive documentation of that state’s experience, and this information has been extensively analyzed in the medical literature. It has, however, received almost no attention in the legal literature. The symposium will consider and debate the significance of the Oregon experience, asking whether it is transferrable to other places.
Moderator: Michelle Oberman
Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
Presenters:
Dr. Robert V. Brody: Hastening Death – Drawing the Line
- Clinical Professor of Medicine and Family & Community Medicine, University of California San Francisco
- Chair, Ethics Committee and Chief, Pain Consultation Clinic, San Francisco General Hospital
- Medical Director, Health at Home, home care agency of the San Francisco
- Department of Public Health
Dr. Joel E. Frader: Medical Care Decisions for Children at the End of Life
- Division Head, General Academic Pediatrics, Children’s Memorial Hospital (Chicago)
- Professor of Pediatrics/Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics
- Feinberg School of Medicine
- Northwestern University
Sylvia A. Law: End of Life Choice as a Civil Rights Struggle
- Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine and Psychiatry
- Co?Director, Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program
- New York University School of Law
Robert Raben: When Law and Politics Lag Behind Popular Will
- The Raben Group, LLC
- Washington, DC
Kathryn Tucker: From Glucksberg v. Washington to Gonzales v. Oregon : The Supreme Court Issues an Invitation; the Attorney General Seeks to Cancel the Event
- Director of Legal Affairs
- Compassion in Dying/End of Life Choices
- Affiliate Professor of Law
- University of Washington School of Law
- Seattle University School of Law
Commentators:
Margalynne Armstrong
Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
Bradley Joondeph
Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
Margaret Russell
Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law
Additional background on the Symposium issues:
In Glucksberg, the Supreme Court Justices unanimously assumed that patients are entitled to adequate pain care, even when such palliative care increases the risk of death. Nonetheless, extensive medical and medical-sociological research demonstrates that, as a Nation, we do a poor job of providing palliative care. Some of those who oppose hastened death assert that the answer is to improve pain care. Whether or not that suggestion is persuasive, broad recognition of a pressing need for better palliative care has become clear. In recent years, many initiatives have been developed by medical educators, the medical profession, and the states.
The issues of choice at the end of life raises important federalism questions. Attorney General John Ashcroft sought to overturn the Oregon Death with Dignity Law by interpreting the federal Controlled Substances Act to prohibit doctors from prescribing drugs to hasten the death of competent terminally ill people. The lower courts held that he lacked that power under the current federal law. Ashcroft v. Oregon, 368 F.3d 1118 (9th Cir. 2004), cert. granted, Gonzalez v. Oregon, 125 S.Ct. 1299 (U.S. Feb. 22, 2005) (No. 04-623). However the Court decides this particular case, federalism issues will remain. If the Court affirms the lower court decision, Congress will likely act to authorize punishment of doctors in states that recognize a right to hasten death. If either the Court or the Congress authorizes such punishment under federal law, constitutional challenges will be made on federalism grounds.
For more information and to obtain a registration form, visit www.scu.edu/law/socialjustice or email jlough@scu.edu.
