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Making Biomedical Policy Through Constitutional Adjudication:The Example Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Carl E. Scheider
Making Biomedical Policy Through Constitutional Adjudication:The Example Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Carl E. Scheider
Book Chapters
Throughout most of American history no one would have supposed biomedical policy could or should be made through constitutional adjudication. No one would have thought that the Constitution spoke to biomedical issues, that those issues were questions of federal policy, or that judges were competent to handle them. Today, however, the resurgence of substantive due process has swollen the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, the distinction between federal and state spheres is tattered, and few statutes escape judicial vetting. Furthermore, Abraham Lincoln's wish that the Constitution should "become the political religion of the nation" has been granted. "We now reverently …
Constitutional Aspects Of Physician-Assisted Suicide After Lee V. Oregon, Simon Canick
Constitutional Aspects Of Physician-Assisted Suicide After Lee V. Oregon, Simon Canick
Faculty Scholarship
On November 8, 1994, Oregon voters narrowly passed the highly controversial Death with Dignity Act (Measure 16), which marked the first time that physician-assisted suicide was explicitly legalized anywhere in the world. In Lee v. Oregon, a group of physicians, several terminally ill persons, a residential care facility, and individual operators of residential care facilities sought to enjoin enforcement of the new law, claiming various constitutional infirmities. The U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon enjoined enforcement of the law, acknowledging that it raised important constitutional issues including possible violations of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of …