Wrong Tomorrow, Wrong Yesterday, but not Today: On Sliding into Evil with Zeal but without Understanding

Collaboration with systems of evil-the overall topic of this Symposium-is a problem as fresh as contemporary news accounts. The New York Times recently carried a front-page story about the dilemmas described by young Serbs who were evading military conscription because they understood the evil of Slobodan Milosevic\u27s genocidal policies against the Kosovar Albanians but nonetheless felt a patriotic duty to protect their country against foreign assaults. As one young man put it, \u27\u27\u27we\u27d like to see [Milosevic] hanging.\u27 But ... \u27[i]f the guys from NATO come here, we will shoot them.\u27 ! As wrenching as this kind of dilemma may be, it is not the problem of collaboration that I want to discuss. My concern is with a more difficult problem, as I see it-a problem that is more insidious and difficult to identify as such. The young Serbian resister knows that his President is an evil man, and he feels the moral conflict between his revulsion at this evil and his patriotic impulses. My concern is for circumstances where the evil is not understood as such by its perpetrators, where they are unaware at the time they are acting of the wrongfulness of the actions in which they are engaged

Self-Determination and the Wrongfulness of Death

Self-determination has become the central ideal governing medical treatment for patients generally and for terminally ill people specifically. Proponents of physician-assisted suicide set this ideal as their core claim. Opponents assert that the practice, if legally recognized, would inevitably slide into involuntary euthanasia for vulnerable people. This article will explore internal tensions within the self-determination ideal as applied to the administration of death that give plausibility to this slippery slope concern

Overruling Dred Scott: The Case for Same-Sex Marriage

Dred Scott v. Sandford is widely acknowledged to be the worst decision ever rendered by the United States Supreme Court. Its specific holdings-that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories and that no black person, whether slave or free, was a citizen of the United States entitled to bring suit in federal courts2-were overruled by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, enacted in the immediate wake of the Civil War.3 But as we mark its 150th anniversary, it is not enough to say that the Dred Scott decision has been overruled. It is not enough to say that slavery has been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment and that African Americans have been acknowledged as United States citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment. We must ask whether these two amendments, taken together, did more than overrule the specific holdings of Dred Scott. We must ask whether there was a deeper meaning to the reversal of this decision in order to determine whether the underlying assumptions of Dred Scott have truly been repudiated in our constitutional realm

Conflict and Trust between Attorney and Client

Professor Burt argues that mistrust pervades relations between attorneys and clients, though practical incentives and the formal norms of the legal profession lead both attorneys and clients to resist admitting this mistrust. Professor Burt further argues that the proposals regarding disclosure of client communications in the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct would add new incentives for such resistance and would exacerbate attorney-client mistrust. He suggests, paradoxically, that more stringent disclosure requirements might prompt honest exploration of attorney-client mistrust and might enhance trust in professional relations generally, even though attorneys would be required in some cases to forfeit clients\u27 trust by disclosing their communications

Confronting Death: Who Chooses? Who Controls? A Dialogue between Dax Cowart and Robert Burt

On 21 November 1996, Dax Cowart and Robert Burt jointly delivered the Heather Koller Memorial Lecture at Pacific Lutheran University. This was the first time that they spoke together in a public forum. Dax Cowart now lives and practices law in Corpus Christi, Texas. In the summer of 1973, he was critically injured in a propane gas explosion that took his father\u27s life and very deeply burned more than two-thirds of his own body. He was left blind and without the use of his hands. For more than a year Dax underwent extraordinarily painful treatments in the acute burn ward of two hospitals. Throughout his ordeal he demanded to die by refusing consent to his disinfectant treatments. Despite repeated declarations of competence by his psychiatrist, all his pleas were rejected. In 1974, while still hospitalized, he helped make the famous Please Let Me Die video, and in 1984 a second video, Dax\u27s Case. In 1986 Dax Cowart received a law degree from Texas Tech Universit

A Proposal for the Abolition of the Incompetency Plea

Though neither convicted of a crime nor civilly committed, many incompetent criminal defendants have been, in effect, serving life terms in state mental hospitals.\u27 A study of Massachusetts practice found, for example, that of all incompetent defendants committed to Bridgewater, the relevant state institution, more .. .had left by dying than by all other avenues combined.\u27 In Jackson v. Indiana, a unanimous Supreme Court ended the common practice of committing for an indeterminate time persons accused of crime but found incompetent to stand trial. Jackson held that an incompetency commitment cannot last longer than the reasonable period of time necessary to determine whether there is a substantial probability that [an incompetent criminal defendant will become competent] . . . in the foreseeable future and that continued commitment must be justified by progress toward that goal

Disorder in the Court: Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Constitution

Justice Robert Jackson once described a Supreme Court decision, from which he was dissenting, as more interesting to students of psychology and of the judicial processes than to students of constitutional law. \u27 His observation might equally apply to the Court\u27s recent rulings about physician-assisted suicide. Whatever their explanation-psychologically or jurisprudentially- the Justices\u27 conduct in this matter was surely unusual