Vacco v. Quill

Quill and other physicians, along with terminally ill patients (plaintiffs), sued New York's Attorney General (defendant), arguing the state's assisted-suicide ban violated equal protection because it let competent patients refuse life-sustaining treatment (hastening death) while barring those same patients from obtaining physician-assisted suicide to achieve a similar result. The district court rejected the claim, but the Second Circuit reversed, finding the law treated similarly situated terminally ill patients unequally; the Supreme Court granted certiorari.