ACLM History Project for the 2010 50^th Annual Meeting

The 2010 annual meeting of the American College of Legal Medicine will be the College’s 50^th annual meeting. To celebrate this milestone, we would like to request from the membership their help in a project that will catalogue the history of the ACLM. Please send any photos, anecdotes or information that you feel would assist the ACLM executive office in its efforts to compile the history of our great College. Hopefully with your help, we will be able to create something truly special to present at the meeting.

Please send any materials and questions to:

Attention: Sue O’Sullivan
American College of Legal Medicine
Two Woodfield Lake
1100 E Woodfield Road, Suite 520
Schaumburg, IL 60173
Phone: (847) 969-0283
Fax: (847) 517-7229
Email: info@aclm.org

Baxter vs. State of Montana:
ACLM files Amicus Brief on June 12, 2009

With the filing on June 12, 2009 of its amicus brief in the case of Baxter v. State of Montana ("Baxter"), the ACLM has now filed or participated in 14 amicus submissions since its first one over 16 years ago (January,1993) in the famous U.S.S.Ct. case of Daubert v. Merrell-Dow Pharmeceuticals. With its filing in Baxter, the College again takes a leadership position in tackling a considerably debated and emotional topic: the rights of competent, terminally-ill citizens who wish to self-medicate to end their lives and thus the intractable pain and suffering occasioned by a terminal disease. The College is also one of a handful of professional organizations who passed resolutions in the last 12 months (it having done so on October 6, 2008) supporting such rights . . . but with legislation in place to implement this right, recognize the continued use of palliative care, and, as well, to provide suitable protections for health care providers who either do, or do not, wish to become involved with such patients. The College is also the first organization to publicly advance that the wishes of a terminally ill though competent patient as described in such cases is not committing a suicide or wishing to be aided in a suicide; the College first advocated this in an amicus brief filed in 1996, also before the U.S.S.Ct. and which can be found in this section. The College again renews this thinking in its most recent filing. We hope you enjoy the brief now on file in the Baxter case, below.

CLICK HERE to read the amicus brief