Elf Sternberg

Actually, there's one other "check" that the legislature has: change the law. Really. One of the key issues that was never discussed was that the legislature had the right to change the order of priority for who had the right to make decisions regarding Mrs. Schiavo's life: they could easily have transferred that right from Michael Schiavo to her parents, but to do so, following the principle that the law is to be applied to everyone, they would have to change the law for everyone. The legislature was unwilling to do that.

I think the Schiavo case proves that the laws and the courts are working, rather than they are not. This was a hard case, not an exemplary one.