Kathryn Tucker

Kathryn Tucker (born 1959) is an American attorney and the executive director of the End of Life Liberty Project, which she founded during her tenure as executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center.^[1] This appointment to the DRLC was opposed by every other major disability rights group and has since been terminated. She graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1985 and Hampshire College in 1981. Tucker has been an adjunct law professor at Lewis and Clark School of Law, Seattle University the University of Washington, Loyola/LA and Hastings. Beginning in 1990, while an attorney at the Seattle firm of Perkins Coie, she did pro bono work for Washington Citizens for Death with Dignity, which led her into the movement to legalize physician assisted suicide.

As legal director of Compassion & Choices in 1997 Tucker argued Washington v. Glucksberg before the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to establish a federal constitutional right to choose physician assisted suicide, but the Supreme Court concluded that PAS is not a protected liberty interest under the US Constitution. Whether to legalize PAS was left up to each individual state. Tucker successfully defended the Oregon Death with Dignity Act in Oregon v. Gonzales. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Controlled Substances Act does not allow the Attorney General to prohibit doctors from proscribing regulated drugs for use in physician assisted suicide under state law that permitted PAS.

Tucker was a lead author of a California law requiring pain management education for physicians, which passed in 2001. Tucker defends physicians who face prosecution for adequate pain management. She has published numerous articles on end-of-life issues in law, medicine and health policy journals.