ABSTRACT
Activism and restraint set the stage for policymaking by mediators—the individuals and institutions that then go on to forge policy results. Policy mediation takes place in a number of different venues. The courts make policy all the time in the form of case law. The courts have come to accept the notion that artificial nutrition and hydration is a medical procedure that a patient may choose to forgo in exercising the established right to die. Fourteen years after Quinlan was decided in New Jersey, the US Supreme Court heard its first case ever dealing explicitly with the right to die: Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health. The federal courts have heard six right-to-die cases in that same time frame, five of which involved incompetent patients and surrogate decisionmakers. Court consensus was relatively easy to achieve on the basic issue of the right to die; the only controversy that remains regarding that basic right concerns what parts of the Constitution apply in such cases.
