Facts
Dr. Harold Glucksberg, a physician—along with four other physicians, three terminally ill patients, and the non-profit organization, Compassion in Dying, counseling those considering assisted-suicide—challenged Washington state's ban against assisted suicide in the Natural Death Act of 1979. They claimed that assisted suicide was a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The District Court ruled in favor of Glucksberg, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed. Then, after rehearing the case en banc, the Ninth Circuit reversed the earlier panel and affirmed the District Court's decision. The case was argued before the United States Supreme Court on January 8, 1997. The question presented was whether the protection of the Due Process Clause included a right to commit suicide, and therefore commit suicide with another's assistance.
Read more about this topic: Washington V. Glucksberg
Famous quotes containing the word facts:
“Great abilites are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. “Blessed be nothing,” and “The worse things are, the better they are,” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)