Image: Charles Brutlag / Shutterstock.comCan Oregon Compel Its Citizens to Pay for Killing Others?
Oregon House of RepresentativesOregon’s Governor has said she will sign legislation that will require insurance companies (with one exception) to provide their beneficiaries, at no cost, and for any reason, abortions and contraceptive drugs that can be abortifacients. California has a similar law. Unlike California’s law, churches and religious organizations that object to abortion and/or contraception are exempt, but there is no protection for business owners who desire to use any insurance company other than Providence Health Plans (the one faith-based insurance company that was exempted). The Oregon legislation also expands state funding to pay for abortions for citizens and non-citizens who do not have private insurance.
Substantive Due Process Is Ready for Takeoff
Clinton appointments to the Supreme Court would endanger constitutional governance in a variety of ways, but one of the most substantial is the creation of rights nowhere to be found in the actual Constitution. Sadly, the stage has been set for great expansion of such rights by Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Obergefell opinion. It, of course, constitutionalized same-sex marriage. More importantly for the future, it destroyed the doctrinal restraints on substantive due process—the Court’s minting house for new rights.
Previously the Supreme Court had sharply restricted the rights that could be found in substantive due process. In Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court rejected the argument that the right to assisted suicide could be found in the Constitution. The Court read its precedents to require strict objective criteria for the identification of a specific fundamental right: it must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” By that strict standard, the right to assisted suicide was a non-starter, because laws against the practice had long existed.
But same-sex marriage could hardly be termed a right “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition” either. In effect, Kennedy said so much the worse for Glucksberg. One reason he gave is that the right to abortion declared in Roe v. Wade itself had itself not met the Glucksberg test. But the right of abortion had persisted in Planned Parenthood v. Casey not because Roe was substantively correct, but only because it was a precedent. Thus, Roe hardly should be taken as generative model for substantive due process.
The Courts and Tradition: A Begrudging Respect
In response to: The Unforgettable Fire: Tradition and the Shape of the Law
Marc DeGirolami’s Liberty Forum essay discusses two contexts in which tradition might influence American law: common law and constitutional law. He suggests that tradition is still robust in the former, less so in the latter. With regard to common law, I think that he’s right that custom underlies a good deal of the law of contracts, torts, property, and more. On the other hand, it strikes me that American common law as interpreted by the judiciary has been far less respectful of precedent (and therefore to some extent, of tradition) than has the common law in other countries. Years ago, I had…
More Responses
Professor DeGirolami has written an interesting Liberty Forum essay in behalf of paying respectful attention to tradition as a major aspect of our legal order. However, I think there are two major problems with it. The first is theoretical, particularly in relation to the American political and legal experience. The second has to do with…
In the first paragraph of his celebrated 1881 book on the common law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” Nor was that the first such expression in the annals of American jurisprudence. At the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, James Madison recorded John Dickinson’s…
The Unforgettable Fire: Tradition and the Shape of the Law
What is the relationship of law and tradition? Tradition, either as a proposition of independent legal value or a register in which to discuss and explain the persistence of our legal arrangements, has very little traction today. In law, as in many other areas of contemporary American life, tradition as a normatively powerful idea is wildly unfashionable—even disreputable. When tradition’s influence on law is considered, responses ordinarily fall somewhere along a predictably confined range—from dismissal and disdain to something like revulsion. A fairly recent Slate article on Khloé Kardashian’s checkered and rather perplexing spiritual practices concisely sums up the general view:…
Responses
Marc DeGirolami’s Liberty Forum essay discusses two contexts in which tradition might influence American law: common law and constitutional law. He suggests that tradition is still robust in the former, less so in the latter. With regard to common law, I think that he’s right that custom underlies a good deal of the law of contracts,…
Professor DeGirolami has written an interesting Liberty Forum essay in behalf of paying respectful attention to tradition as a major aspect of our legal order. However, I think there are two major problems with it. The first is theoretical, particularly in relation to the American political and legal experience. The second has to do with…
In the first paragraph of his celebrated 1881 book on the common law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” Nor was that the first such expression in the annals of American jurisprudence. At the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, James Madison recorded John Dickinson’s…
Locating Traditionalism in Jurisprudence
How might we distinguish the traditionalist judicial decision?
