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Morals-Based Justifications For Lawmaking: Before And After Lawrence V. Texas, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Morals-Based Justifications For Lawmaking: Before And After Lawrence V. Texas, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers
Morals-Based Justifications for Lawmaking: Before and After Lawrence v. Texas looks in depth at the dissonance between the Supreme Court’s rhetorical support for morals-based lawmaking and the Court’s jurisprudence. In taking this approach, the article responds to a central post-Lawrence question regarding the sufficiency of a government’s moral agenda as a justification for restricting individual rights. It turns out, on close review of the cases going back to the mid-1800s, that the Court has almost never relied explicitly on a morals rationale to sustain an allegedly rights-infringing government action.
The article develops several explanations for this avoidance of explicit morals …