Conference Explores Landmark Schiavo Case: One year later, experts discuss lessons learned, where to go from here

In March 2005, the Terri Schiavo case riveted the nation. Who would decide the fate of the 41-year-old brain-damaged Florida woman who had been languishing in a permanent vegetative state for years: her husband, her parents, a guardian or a judge? The debate and struggle for control entangled state and federal courts, Florida's legislature and governor, the U.S. Congress, the president of the United States, and even the Vatican.

A year after Schiavo's death, Boston University's School of Law and School of Public Health (BUSPH ) co-sponsored "The Terri Schiavo Case: One Year Later," a conference that considered the legal, medical, ethical and political lessons learned from this epic case.

The conference aimed to "focus and inform the critical public debate about patient rights at the end of life," according to organizer Wendy Mariner, a lawyer and professor at BU's schools of law, medicine and public health.

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank provided the keynote address for the conference, which included experts who played a role in deciding, debating or covering the case and the issues it raised. Frank, who represents the Massachusetts Fourth Congressional District, led an unsuccessful but insightful and informative floor fight in Congress against emergency legislation that authorized federal court review of the Schiavo case.

Frank was also joined by the case's trial court Judge George Greer, who was awarded the Pike Prize at the conference, and the nation's leading expert on permanent vegetative states, Dr. Ronald Cranford of the University of Minnesota, who examined Terri Schiavo for the trial court and whose diagnosis of her is considered definitive.

Health lawyer and bioethicist George Annas, the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at BUSPH and Professor of Law at BU Law, also spoke. Annas wrote an influential article about the Schiavo case that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine two days after the Congress passed the "Schiavo law."

BU Associate Professor of Law Allan H. Macurdy, J.D., who also heads the University's office of disability services, discussed competing conceptions of disability, discrimination and compassion as they play out in protecting the rights and welfare of patients.