One advantage your current approach does have is that it will raise an error if multiple rows are returned by the predicate. To reproduce that you can use.
SELECT @currentTerm = currentterm,
@termID = termid,
@endDate = enddate
FROM table1
WHERE iscurrent = 1
IF( @@ROWCOUNT <> 1 )
BEGIN
RAISERROR ('Unexpected number of matching rows',
16,
1)
RETURN
END