Beginning in 1990, while an attorney at the Seattle firm of Perkins Coie, she did pro bono work for Washington Citizens for Death with Dignity, which led her into the movement to legalize physician assisted suicide.
As legal director of Compassion & Choices in 1997 Tucker argued Washington v. Glucksberg before the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to establish a federal constitutional right to choose physician assisted suicide, but the Supreme Court concluded that PAS is not a protected liberty interest under the US Constitution.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Controlled Substances Act does not allow the Attorney General to prohibit doctors from proscribing regulated drugs for use in physician assisted suicide under state law that permitted PAS.
Tucker was a lead author of a California law requiring pain management education for physicians, which passed in 2001.
She has published numerous articles on end-of-life issues in law, medicine and health policy journals.