Challenges to Brain Death in Revising the Uniform Determination of Death Act

Brain death, more recently called death determination by neurologic criteria,¹ is at the nexus of current controversy as the US Uniform Law Commission (ULC) seeks to revise the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA). The UDDA was developed in 1980 by the ULC, then called the National Conference of Commissioners for Uniform State Laws, in conjunction with the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, and the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research.² The UDDA was designed with 2 principal goals: to enhance the uniformity of death determination among states and to codify the new determination of death based on the irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain, a condition that had been concisely and popularly, though infelicitously, termed “brain death.”³ The President's Commission's first report in 1981, Defining Death, provided the conceptual justification for the UDDA and showed how brain death determination should be best incorporated into a model statute of death.⁴ The ULC effort was extremely successful because a large majority of states enacted the UDDA verbatim or with only minor modifications.⁵