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U.S. Supreme Court leaves medical issues to states

In its latest session, the high court showed it may be withdrawing its heavy hand from medical judgment.

By Amy Lynn Sorrel, amednews staff. Aug. 7, 2006.

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With two new conservative justices shifting the fulcrum of the bench, physicians and legal experts say the U.S. Supreme Court has shown signs of taking a less interventionist tack in medical decision-making, leaving individual states to govern often divisive subjects such as abortion, mental illness and physician-assisted suicide.

The docket in the 2005-06 term, which ended in June, was loaded with a number of cases that galvanized the medical community on issues addressing the scope of medical judgment in patient care. And court watchers anticipate that the trend may continue with similar hot-button topics already on the docket for the next session, set to begin in October.

The federal ban on so-called "partial-birth" abortion is already on the docket, and experts see issues such as stem cell research and lethal injection winding their way up to the Supreme Court level.

"The big question facing the court [in these cases] is the extent to which our legal system will defer to medical judgment," said Arthur B. LaFrance, a law professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon.

He pointed to Gonzales v. Oregon, in which justices in January upheld Oregon's law allowing doctors to prescribe controlled substances to terminally ill patients who wish to end their lives. The court ruled that the U.S. attorney general does not have the authority to ban that use of such drugs.

The court did not go so far as to explore whether doctors and patients have the right to engage in assisted suicide, explained LaFrance, who co-authored an amicus brief in the case defending Oregon's law. But justices suggested that "there is space for states to legislate differently."