Kathryn Tucker
Director of Advocacy
National Psychedelic Association
BIO
Kathryn L. Tucker is Special Counsel at Emerge Law Group, where she Co-Chairs the Psychedelic Practice Group. Tucker is also Executive Director of the End of Life Liberty Project (ELLP). Tucker founded the ELLP during her tenure as Executive Director of the Disability Rights Legal Center (DRLC), the nation’s oldest disability rights advocacy organization. Tucker served two decades as Director of Advocacy and Legal Affairs for Compassion & Choices, working to improve care and expand choice at the end of life. Prior to that, Ms. Tucker practiced law with Perkins Coie. She has held faculty appointments as Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and as Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Washington, Seattle University and Lewis & Clark Schools of Law, teaching in the areas of law, medicine and ethics, with a focus on the end of life. In April 2014, Professor Tucker was named a Fulbright Specialist by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education’s Council for International Exchange of Scholars, to share her scholarship abroad. She served as a Fulbright Specialist with Faculty Appointments at the Universities of Auckland, Canterbury and Otago in 2015; in 2019 Tucker received another Fulbright Specialist Grant to teach at law schools in the United Kingdom. In 2018, the ELLP was a Visiting Sponsored Project of the UCSF/UC Hastings Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy.
Ms. Tucker served as lead counsel representing patients and physicians in two landmark federal cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, asserting that mentally competent terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to choose aid in dying. These cases are widely acknowledged to have prompted nationwide attention to improving care of the dying, and to have established a federal constitutional right to aggressive pain management.
Ms. Tucker also handles state constitutional litigation asserting claims of a similar nature, including Baxter v. Montana which established the right to choose aid in dying as a matter of state law.
Ms. Tucker played a key role in successfully defending the Oregon Death with Dignity Act from attack by the United States Department of Justice in Oregon v. Gonzales, representing the patient plaintiffs in proceedings before the Federal District Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Also experienced and skillful in legislative advocacy, Ms. Tucker was involved in the development of, and successful campaigns to pass, the Washington Death with Dignity Act (2008) and Vermont’s Patient Choice at the End of Life Act (2013).
Ms. Tucker is recognized as a national leader in spearheading creative and effective efforts to promote improved care for seriously ill and dying patients. She served as co-counsel in the first case in the nation to assert that failure to treat pain adequately constitutes elder abuse, which resulted in a finding of liability and a jury verdict award of $1.5 million to the patient’s family. She has been principal author of various state legislative measures to ensure physician education in pain management and provision of information to terminally ill patients about end-of-life care options. She also defends physicians facing adverse consequences for treating pain attentively and aggressively.
Professor Tucker is an invited speaker at educational programs on the subjects of improving care at the end of life, end-of-life decision-making, and aid in dying. She has presented to the American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Management, the Federation of State Medical Boards, and the American College of Legal Medicine.
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