This book presents the results of a 2-year interdisciplinary research project on the subject “Legal and ethical questions raised by advance care decision making in Germany and Italy: a comparative, European and international law perspective”, which was approved and financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) in the framework of the Vigoni Program 2010. This joint endeavour was an initiative of Prof. Dr. Stefania Negri, director of the Observatory on Human Rights: Bioethics, Health, Environment of the University of Salerno. Prof. Dr. Jochen Taupitz, managing director of the Institute for German, European and International Medical Law, Public Health Law and Bioethics (IMGB) of the Universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim, gladly accepted her invitation to join the project. The project brought together German and Italian academics from different fields and backgrounds and was conceived in a period when the debate on end-of-life care and advance directives regulation was particularly lively across Europe and exceptionally topical both in Germany and in Italy. In fact, acceptability and regulation of end-of-life decisions and permissibility of different forms of euthanasia have recently experienced an increasing attention from the scientific community in many European countries. An animated discussion on these topics has thus taken shape in ethical and legal literature, as well as in medical practice. This has also triggered a very emotional reflection on the patients’ right to refuse or discontinue life-sustaining or life-prolonging efforts as part of their right to informed consent and self-determination (including the highly controversial right to die with dignity). In this context, several countries have passed legislation aimed at regulating individual choices by way of health care advance directives.