Cliffy
January 18, 2006, 7:03pm
41
Fear Itself already gave it, as expanded by treis : “Says who?” Where’s Justice Scalia’s medical degree?
–Cliffy
My understanding is that Scalia isn’t trying to create a new definition or even use his own definition. He’s being asked if the AG’s definition is reasonable. Since that definition agrees with the official stance of the AMA, he conlcudes that it is reasonable. He specifically states that he isn’t in a postition to decide that, and neither are the justices in the majority. Did I get that wrong in describing his reasoning?
As recounted in detail in the memorandum for the Attorney General that is attached as an appendix to the Directive (OLC Memo), virtually every medical authority from Hippocrates to the current American Medical Association (AMA) confirms that assisting suicide has seldom or never been viewed as a form of “prevention, cure, or alleviation of disease,” and (even more so) that assisting suicide is not a “legitimate” branch of that “science and art.” See OLC Memo, App. to Pet. for Cert. 113a-130a. Indeed, the AMA has determined that " ‘[p]hysician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer.’ "
<snip>
In the face of this “overwhelming weight of authority,” the Court’s admission that “[o]n its own, this understanding of medicine’s boundaries is at least reasonable,” ante, at 26 (emphasis added), tests the limits of understatement. The only explanation for such a distortion is that the Court confuses the normative inquiry of what the boundaries of medicine should be–which it is laudably hesitant to undertake–with the objective inquiry of what the accepted definition of “medicine” is.