Death With Dignity’s Emerging Conceit: Could Vacco v. Quill Be Losing Its Appeal?
Arthur G. Svenson, 31 U. La Verne L. Rev. 45 (2009)
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The holding of one Montana judge, who discovered a fundamental right to PAD within enumerated state rights to privacy and dignity, is unlikely to have a parroting effect upon non-Montanan state judges reviewing the constitutional implications of death with dignity issues. After all, Montana’s is only one of five state constitutions that contain substantive enumerations of privacy rights, and for three of those that do, California, Florida, and Alaska, judges have already considered and denied pleadings that state privacy rights shield actions of patients and willing physicians from criminal prosecution for actions amounting to assisted suicide. For the Justices of the Supreme Court, the absence of a ‘careful description of [an] asserted fundamental liberty interest’ in the Bill of Rights that even remotely resembled PAD proved pivotal in convincing them to decline Glucksberg’s invitation to create such a right on their own. Given that reasoning, then, one could quite plausibly imagine that most judges in most states confronting similar state challenges on cognate state constitutional grounds would unhesitatingly follow the High Court’s lead and choose to defer to the prevailing forces at play in the political arena.
