
In his 2006 book about death with dignity and the right to die (The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia), Neil Gorsuch leveled several criticisms, by implication, against Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act (DWDA), a law that deals not at all with assisted suicide or euthanasia. Under the Oregon law, a person desiring a hastened death in the face of terminal illness may take his own life with a lethal prescription drug or drugs, unassisted by another person. Nevertheless, Gorsuch argues that we can’t determine the value of the DWDA for other jurisdictions without knowing how Oregon’s law is working in practice, and he asserts that we don’t have enough information about that.