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Brief of Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, thomas Scanlon, and Judity Jarvis Thomson as Mici Curiae in Support of Respondents*
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Interest of the Amici Curiae
Amici are six moral and political philosophers who differ on many issues of public morality and policy. They are united, however, in their conviction that respect for fundamental principles of liberty and justice, as well as for the American constitutional tradition, requires that the decisions of the Courts of Appeals be affirmed.'
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Introduction and Summary of Argument
These cases do not invite or require the Court to make moral, ethical or religious judgments about how people should approach or confront their death or about when it is ethically appropriate to hasten one's own death or to ask others for help in doing so. On the contrary they ask the Court to recognize that individuals have a constitutionally protected interest in making those grave judgments for themselves, free from the imposition of any religious or philosophical orthodoxy by court or legislature. States have a constitutionally legitimate interest in protecting individuals from irrational, ill-informed, pressured or unstable decisions to hasten their own death. To that end, states may regulate and limit the assistance that doctors may give individuals who express a wish to die. But states may not deny people in the position of the patient-plaintiffs in these cases the opportunity to demonstrate, through whatever reasonable procedures the state might institute-even procedures that err on the side of caution-that their decision to die is indeed informed, stable, and fully free. Denying that opportunity to terminally-ill patients who are in agonizing pain or otherwise doomed to an existence they regard as intolerable could only be justified on the basis of a religious or ethical conviction about the value or meaning of life itself. Our Constitution forbids government to impose such convictions on its citizens.
Petitioners and the amici who support them offer two contradictory arguments. Some deny that the patient-plaintiffs have any constitutionally protected liberty interest in hastening their own deaths.2 But that liberty interest flows directly from this Court's previous decisions. It flows [41 from the right of people to make their own decisions about matters "involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may...