Richard Cooper is a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Williams & Connolly, specializing in food and drug law. Formerly, he was general counsel at the Food and Drug Administration.

Richard A. Merrill is Daniel Caplin Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and is editor and author of multiple books on food and drug law.

Dr. Michael Grodin is professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University School of Public Health and a clinical medical ethicist for Boston Medical Center.

A May 16, 2013, piece from Stateline exploring the effects of Oklahoma’s law that states “patients who are disabled, elderly or terminally ill cannot be denied life-preserving treatments if they or their health proxies want it.”

A May 2013 Huffington Post and YouGov poll found that 50 percent of Americans think physician-assisted suicide should be legal, while 29 percent think it should be illegal.

Dr. Jerome Groopman is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. Contact Dr. Groopman through his website.

Courts in Montana will reconsider the state’s current lack of rulings on physician-assisted suicides, explains a Billings Gazette story published June 12, 2013. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Montana stated that nothing prevented physician-assisted suicides from being legal, but did not say clearly whether they are or not.

Sylvia A. Law is Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine and Psychiatry and co-director of the Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program at New York University Law School.

Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel is the Diane Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor in the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.