Mitchell Hamline School of Law Mitchell Hamline Open Access Faculty Scholarship 2016 Texas Advance Directives Act: Nearly a Model Dispute Resolution Mechanism for Intractable Medical Futility Conflicts Thaddeus Pope Mitchell Hamline School of Law,
[email protected] Publication Information 16 QUT Law Review 22 (2016) Repository Citation Pope, Thaddeus, "Texas Advance Directives Act: Nearly a Model Dispute Resolution Mechanism for Intractable Medical Futility Conflicts" (2016). Faculty Scholarship. Paper 378. http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/facsch/378 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Mitchell Hamline Open Access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Mitchell Hamline Open Access. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Texas Advance Directives Act: Nearly a Model Dispute Resolution Mechanism for Intractable Medical Futility Conflicts Abstract Increasingly, clinicians and commentators have been calling for the establishment of special adjudicatory dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve intractable medical futility disputes. As a leading model to follow, policymakers both around the United States and around the world have been looking to the conflict resolution provisions in the 1999 Texas Advance Directives Act (‘TADA’). In this article, I provide a complete and thorough review of the purpose, history, and operation of TADA. I conclude that TADA is a commendable attempt to balance the competing goals of efficiency and fairness in the resolution of these time-sensitive life-and-death conflicts. But TADA is too lopsided. It is far more efficient than it is fair. TADA should be amended to better comport with fundamental notions of procedural due process.