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Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler
Rights Against Rules: The Moral Structure Of American Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Adler
Michigan Law Review
The Bill of Rights, by means of open-ended terms such as "freedom of speech," "equal protection," or "due process," refers to moral criteria, which take on constitutional status by virtue of being thus referenced. We can disagree about whether the proper methodology for judicial application of these criteria is originalist or nonoriginalist. The originalist looks, not to the true content of the moral criteria named by the Constitution, but to the framers' beliefs about that content; the nonoriginalist tries to determine what the criteria truly require, and ignores or gives less weight to the framers' views. Bracketing this disagreement, however, …
Leaving The Door Ajar: The Supreme Court And Assisted Suicide, Melvin I. Urofsky
Leaving The Door Ajar: The Supreme Court And Assisted Suicide, Melvin I. Urofsky
University of Richmond Law Review
In June, 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that a constitutional right to assisted suicide exists in neither the Due Process nor the Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. But while a federal right does not exist, the Court made it quite clear that the states had ample leeway in which to fashion law on this issue; moreover, the concurring opinions of five Justices strongly implied that, should the states enact legislation that would severely limit end-of-life choices, the Supreme Court would revisit the issue. Far from slamming the door shut on assisted suicide, the Court left it more than …