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Legal Criteria for Orders Not to Resuscitate: A Response to Justice Liacos
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2021
Extract
Justice Liacos's comments on the Saikewicz decision should end much of the debate that has swirled around the scope of this landmark case, and I commend MEDICOLEGAL NEWS or publishing his remarks. However, two aspects of the article deserve further comment.
First, it seems unfair to criticize lawyers for not immediately reading the case the way Justice Liacos now says it should have been read. While the opinion in Saikewicz is reasonably clear about the substantive rights of incompetent patients, it is imprecise about the procedures to be followed in implementing those rights. For example, in discussing the role of the probate court in such cases, the broad language used in the decision could be read as requiring a judge to review all treatment decisions involving incompetent patients.
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- Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1980
Footnotes
This comment is a response to an article by Justice Paul Liacos of the Massachusetrs Supreme Judicial Court, entitled Dilemmas of Dying, which appeared in MEDICOLEGAL NEWS, vol. 7, no. 3 (Summer 1979).