Roundtable REGISTRATION

Kathryn  Tucker is Special Counsel at Emerge Law Group, where she Co-Chairs the Psychedelic Practice Group. Prior to this, she served as Executive Director of the End of Life Liberty Project (ELLP),  which she founded  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.   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.   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.  

Tucker worked on Oregon’s Measure 109(psilocybin therapy) and is representing an oncology clinic in the first effort to apply Right to Try to psilocybin.