“No Code” Orders: Clarification in the Aftermath of Saikewicz

ON June 30, 1978, the Massachusetts Appeals Court decided, in a case entitled "In the Matter of Shirley Dinnerstein,"1 that the earlier Saikewicz2,3 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court does not require prior judicial review and approval of a "no code" order directing that resuscitative measures be withheld from an irreversibly, terminally ill incompetent patient in the event of cardiac or respiratory failure. Although the Supreme Judicial Court had said in Saikewicz that judicial resolution of questions of life and death do not constitute, in its view, an "encroachment on the domain of medical expertise," the Dinnerstein Court said . . .