Legal Work
Compassion & Choices' legal advocacy team, which litigates patient cases related to ensuring adequate end-of-life care and choice, represented 16 terminally ill patient-plaintiffs at the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Oregon, defeating the Bush administration challenge to Oregon's Death with Dignity Act in January 2006.
Through litigation, Compassion & Choices works for terminally ill patients' rights to receive pain and symptom management, to voluntarily stop life-sustaining treatments, to request and receive palliative sedation, and to choose aid in dying under state and federal constitutional protections. Kathryn Tucker is legal affairs director for Compassion & Choices.
Read more about this topic: Compassion & Choices
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or work:
“If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are constantly being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)