Assisted Suicide and the Right to Die:  the Interface of Social Science, Public Policy, and Medical Ethics   by Barry Rosenfeld
Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, c2004
R726 .R64 2004   Basement

In Assisted Suicide and the Right to Die: The Interface of Social Science, Public Policy, and Medical Ethics, Barry Rosenfeld examines how social science can inform policy and practice issues in the ongoing debates on end-of-life issues. While some important elements of the arguments for advocacy or opposition to the legalization of assisted suicide, such as moral and ethical concerns, are not necessarily the domain of science, others are amenable to scientific study, including such questions as whether untreated pain or depression fuel requests for assisted suicide.

This thoughtful, comprehensive, and balanced volume reviews and synthesizes what research has uncovered thus far, and provides rich context on the major legal, ethical, clinical, social policy, and psychological research issues involved in end-of-life decision-making. Topics include assessment of patient decision-making abilities, do-not-resuscitate orders, and advance directives. Chapters on experience with legalized assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands supplement those devoted to reviewing the psychosocial and medical literature on who seeks assisted suicide and why.

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code  and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.

All creative works—books, movies, records, software, and so on—are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible—technologically and legally.  For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs.  The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role.  What did he know that we’ve forgotten

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.  

This tautly told story steps back to a time when Detroit's boosters described their city as one of the most cosmopolitan in the world. It was also a city in which tensions between blacks and whites seemed manageable. Yet all that changed in 1925, when a black family named Sweet bought and moved into a house in a white neighborhood. What began with mothers bringing their children to gawk and stare soon became an angry mob of men, some of them from the local KKK, with stones.

The violence that ensued landed Ossian Sweet, a doctor from the "talented tenth," and others from his family in jail and compelled the NAACP -- which had taken up the Sweets' case -- to hire famed attorney Clarence Darrow, who had just finished defending the plaintiff in Tennessee v. John Scopes. Darrow's defense led to one of the most incendiary courtroom dramas in the history of the United States. The outcome was a triumph of cooperation that transcended race in the name of justice. 

In any democratically constituted regime, the real value of the principle of equality can be measured in a very revealing way: by evaluating the consistency and impartiality of tax legislation and its judicial review. Such an evaluation, using a comparative approach to applicable law in several European jurisdictions, is essentially what this book provides.

The six authors, a supreme court justice, a professional tax consultant, a tax inspector, and three tax law academics, treat such crucial issues as the following:

Since the late nineteenth century, federal and state rules governing immigration and naturalization have placed persons of Asian ancestry outside the boundaries of formal membership. A review of leading cases in American constitutional law regarding Asians would suggest that initially, Asian immigrants tended to evade exclusionary laws through deliberate misrepresentations of their identities or through extralegal means. Eventually, many of these immigrants and their descendants came to accept prevailing legal norms governing their citizenship in the United States. In many cases, this involved embracing notions of white supremacy.

John S. W. Park argues that American rules governing citizenship and belonging remain fundamentally unjust, even though they suggest the triumph of a "civil rights" vision, where all citizens share the same basic rights. By continuing to privilege members over non-members in ways that are politically popular, these rules mask injustices that violate principles of fairness. Importantly, Elusive Citizenship also suggests that politically and socially, full membership in American society remains closely linked with participation in exclusionary practices that isolate racial minorities in America.