THE RIGHT TO DIE WITH DIGNITY: FROM JUDICIAL COURAGE TO SIMPLIFIED REALITY

There is a particular kind of constitutional question that courts tend to circle rather than answer — not because the law is unclear, but because the answer requires saying something that the institution has not been ready to say. For much of independent India's legal history, the question of whether a dying person could lawfully refuse treatment was exactly that kind of question. It sat in the background of medical practice, in the exhausted silences of hospital waiting rooms, in the moral uncertainty of doctors who did not know what they were permitted to do and what they weren't. Common Cause (A Regd. Society) v. Union of India1 did not resolve that uncertainty cleanly or completely. But it moved the law further than any prior judgment had managed, and its 2023 sequel2 corrected much of what the 2018 ruling got wrong in practice. This commentary examines both: the constitutional reasoning that got the Court to yes, the procedural framework that initially made that yes nearly unusable, and the legislative absence that still hangs over the whole enterprise.