Justice Story on the office of the Chief Justice of the United States

The Chief Justiceship of the United States is a station full of perplexing duties, and delicate responsibilities, and requiring qualities so various, as well as so high, that no man, conscious of human infirmity, can fail to approach it with extreme diffidence and distrust of his own competency. It is the very post, where weakness, and ignorance, and timidity must instantly betray themselves, and sink to their natural level. It is difficult even for the profession at large fully to appreciate the extent of the labors, the various attainments, the consummate learning, and the exquisite combination of moral qualities, which are demanded to fill it worthily.

Joseph Story, Life, Character, and Services of Chief Justice Marshall: A Discourse Pronounced on the 15th of October, 1835, at the Request of the Suffolk Bar, The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story (William W. Story, ed., 1852) 639.

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Must the Little Sisters of the Poor implement the HHS Mandate?

Today is the deadline to file comments on the HHS Mandate Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Among the many groups commenting today are the Little Sisters of the Poor. Their comments filed today are available here, and their prior statements on the HHS Mandate are available here and here.

As this 2005 Wall Street Journal article explains, the Little Sisters of the Poor have “an odd business plan” for their homes for the elderly poor: “Beg for help, lavish it on residents.” But more confounding than the Little Sisters’ business plan is the idea that the federal government would force them to arrange their health coverage for their homes’ employees to ensure coverage of female sterilization and the free flow of all FDA-approved contraceptives, including abortifacient drugs and devices.

President Obama is a college sports fan, but he should know better than to think that the Little Sisters of the Poor are simply “a euphemism in college sports to describe a weak opponent.” The Little Sisters are real; the HHS Mandate burdens their religious exercise; and the Obama Administration has the power to lift that burden. Lifting that burden is also the President’s duty under federal law.

Some excerpts from the comments:

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A Lawrence quotation prompted by Buzzfeed’s pick-up of MacDonald v. Moose

With Buzzfeed having picked up Virginia’s petition for rehearing en banc in MacDonald v. Moose (previously discussed here and here), I am prompted to post a quotation from the Court’s opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that recently jumped out at me.

First, some background. I argued in my first post on the case that the panel majority misread Lawrence v. Texas as requiring facial invalidation of the “anti-sodomy provision” in Virginia’s “crimes against nature” statute. One basis for my argument was the claim that “reasoning throughout [Lawrence] is all about the petitioners’ personal interests in liberty and privacy.” One commenter on that post criticized its reasoning by asserting that “bending over backwards to say that the facts here are slightly different and that should be sufficient is not a reasonable position to take because it is based on narrowing Justice Kennedy’s entire due-process analysis to one case and one case only.” That is not the position I meant to adopt. Rather, the force of Lawrence as a precedent rests on its ratio decidendi, which is an understanding of the constitutionally protected personal liberty interests of two adults to engage in certain private, consensual conduct.

Apart from what I have previously posted on the subject, support for my reading of the case can be seen in Justice Kennedy’s description of how the case ought to be decided: “We conclude the case should be resolved by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution” (emphasis added). If one reads Lawrence in this way, then the Virginia court’s disposition of the petitioner’s challenge to his conviction was plainly not contrary to or an unreasonable application of clearly established law.

 

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