Right-to-Die Policies in the American States: Judicial and Legislative Innovation

Examining policy reinvention and the interaction between state courts and legislatures, Smith offers a general theory of "permissive" or "morality-based" policy adoption and tests hypotheses by examining state adoption of right-to-die policies (living will laws, durable power of attorney statutes, and surrogate decision making rules).

The results of statistical (event history) models and comparative case studies indicate that controversial policy adoption is a function of political, institutional, regional, and vertical influences. Different factors dominate policy making in the judicial and legislative branches of the state governments. Smith's is one of the first studies to explicitly model the interplay between these two types of institutions during the policy diffusion process.