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Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Abigail R. Moncrieff
As the lawsuits challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) have evolved, one feature of the litigation has proven especially rankling to the legal academy: the incorporation of substantive libertarian concerns into the structural federalism analysis. The breadth and depth of scholarly criticism is surprising, however, given that judges frequently choose indirect methods, including structural and process-based methods of the kinds at issue in the ACA litigation, for protecting substantive constitutional values. Indeed, indirection in the protection of constitutional liberties is a well-known and well-theorized strategy, which one scholar recently termed “semisubstantive review” and another recently theorized as …
Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Aca Litigation And The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Aca Litigation And The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Abigail R. Moncrieff
This article confronts and challenges an emerging scholarly consensus that criticizes the hybridization of substantive and structural arguments in the litigation over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Although there is no doubt that the ACA plaintiffs have requested and the ACA judges have provided a hybrid substantive-structural holding, there is nothing at all unusual about this indirect strategy for protecting constitutional liberty interests; it is a well-known and well-theorized strategy, which one scholar recently termed “semisubstantive review.” The article considers three possible distinctions between the ACA case and the ordinary case of semisubstantive review, and concludes that …