Professor McAllister's Advocacy for "End of Life Option" Featured in Princeton Alumni Weekly

Professor Lesley McAllister is profiled in a Princeton Alumni Weekly article that focuses on her battle with metastatic cancer and her role as an advocate for the California End of Life Option Act, which permits individuals with terminal illnesses to obtain a lethal dose of sedatives and so end their own lives.

McAllister, who earned her B.S. in Civil Engineering and Public Policy from Princeton in 1991 and also has a master's degree and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in addition to her J.D. from Stanford Law School, was diagnosed with cancer shortly after joining the King Hall faculty in 2013.  The article offers an overview of her career as a distinguished scholar in the field of U.S. and Latin American environmental law and details her experiences as a cancer patient.

In the Princeton Alumni Weekly article, McAllister says that her advocacy for the California End of Life Option Act, which was signed into law in October 2015, stems from her belief that terminally ill patients deserve some control over the time and manner of death. "In suicide," McAllister states, "you're choosing between life and death. With the End of Life Option Act, you're choosing the time and manner of your death, knowing that it is inevitably coming within a short period of time. The law allows you to have a little bit of control over when, where, and how."