In his dissertation, Legislating the Good Death: The Regulation of Hastened Death in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century America, Shai Lavi, a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, asks what cultural, social, legal and medical changes had to occur in order for death to become subject to human will. Under what historical conditions and in what ways has law come to endorse actions that hasten the end of life? Central to Lavi’s study is the thesis that the answers to such questions depend not only on the advancement of technology, the structure of the medical profession, the rise of patients’ rights, or the growing power of the state; rather we must look to deeper cultural transformations in our understanding of what a good death is, and what sanctity of life signifies.