Best post I’ve seen around the legality. Some Genuine questions:
- Roe v Wade - bad law, but the personal right to direct your own body.
- The 5th amendment (the right to refuse medical care)
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt5_4_5_2_5_1/ &
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1651109/ &
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10107437/
- it’s against the Geneva Convention to which the US is a signatory
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule92
- Jacobson was also for a treatment with a 100+ year of use, and in a situation where the danger of the condition was absolutely known and accepted, and the risk of the treatment was also known.
The whole thing seems like ripe for review, as how many finding had the SCOTUS made around slavery being legal, racial confinement being appropriate, etc… Do you think they can be trusted though after so many of the questionable/evasive calls over the last few years?
Thanks. The questions you raise are good ones, with clear implications for many pandemic-related governmental choices, but the answers are uniformly in favor of mandates:
Roe v. Wade is widely recognized by lawyers as not being the same as "the personal right to direct your own body." The biggest proponent of that interpretation is the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (my new granddaughter, born on July 27, is named for her, even though I pointed out that Justice Ginsburg once criticized me in an opinion footnote -- but I couldn't complain because she also wrote that unanimous decision in my favor). As a recent
New York Times article pointed out: "The way Justice Ginsburg saw it,
Roe v. Wade was focused on the wrong argument — that restricting access to abortion violated a woman’s privacy. What she hoped for instead was a protection of the right to abortion on the basis that restricting it impeded gender equality." Actually, what she hoped for was what you said: the right to control your own body, and she didn't get that declaration in
Roe or later. Ironically, that is also the argument that anti-abortion activists are making right now against
Roe in their Supreme Court briefs in the pending abortion cases, as the
Washington Post reported yesterday: "Ginsburg, who died last September, is invoked repeatedly in many of the 70 friend-of-the-court briefs urging the Supreme Court to use a Mississippi case this fall to overturn the nearly 50-year-old precedent that established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion." Prof. Caitlin Borgmann wrote a 2014 law review article on the constitutionality of government-imposed bodily intrusions, which found there was no constitutional prohibition against bodily-intrusion, only a "common-law" (judge-made, no constitutional basis) right, which, of course, cannot trump the Supreme Court's clear direction in
Jacobson. Thus, in the context of this thread, the right of privacy (which is what
Roe and other reproduction-related cases, like
Griswold v. Connecticut, are based on) has some effect on vaccination mandates, but only indirectly, and can't serve as the basis for a claim that the Constitution bars employers from requiring vaccination. Again, it would take a Supreme Court decision to overrule
Jacobson and we have no such decision, as the lower courts are uniformly recognizing these days.
The part of the Fifth Amendment (Federal laws) or Fourteenth Amendment (State) cited for the right to refuse medical care is actually the Due Process guarantee that says that the government can't take away substantive rights without due process of law (which might mean a trial or administrative proceeding, or simply following the rules set by Congress or the Constitution). A Supreme Court case is the most "process" anyone can get in our system of government, and is one reason earlier decisions ("precedent") are generally not going to be overruled without another case offering sufficient process itself. Again, in light of
Jacobson, a "process" right is not enough to displace a Supreme Court decision without another Supreme Court decision.
One of my grandmothers was one of the first female European international lawyers, so I respect international law for what it can do. Nevertheless, international conventions do not overrule the Constitution (which here means the Supreme Court), though they can guide the Supreme Court in its interpretations of what American law means. A treaty or convention is basically a contract by the U.S. government, either Executive or Legislative branches. Imagine what would happen if the U.S. Government signed a treaty saying that Americans must abide by foreign or religious law in the U.S.; American courts considering challenges on a wide variety of statutory, religious and free expression grounds would likely ignore that treaty as beyond the President's or Congress's power ("ultra vires"). IOW, those branches can't contract away the Supreme Court's constitutional power to define American law about pandemics, except in a very few cases where the laws are ambiguous. Vaccine mandates aren't one of those few cases, especially where (to my knowledge) no other country recognizes the Geneva or other conventions or treaties as grounds for barring the use of vaccines. Indeed, the arguments go the other way, as when WHO demands that Americans not get vaccine boosters until more vaccine doses are shipped to poor countries. That's an ethical or moral demand, not a requirement of international law.
165 million Americans (as well as others around the globe) have had one or more vaccines, the dangers of Covid-19 are well-established enough to justify governmental action (or employer action) even if some people don't agree, and the risks of treatment (or here, non-treatment) are similarly evident enough to justify mandates. More importantly, it isn't the smallpox vaccine that's at issue in this thread, it's the long-standing constitutional principle reiterated by
Jacobson in 1905 about who gets to make the vaccine mandate and how it is to be done. For those following legal originalism (the doctrine that, even if the Founders didn't foresee later developments like cell phones, they did establish lasting guides for how we should apply fundamental constitutional principles like free speech and unreasonable search and seizures), long before
Jacobson, Ben Franklin mourned not vaccinating his son in 1736, when vaccination was new and untested. IOW, the Founders knew about and approved of vaccinations; they could have prohibited vaccinations in the Constitution or even in the Federalist Papers, but they did not. The poster to whom I was responding asserted that there is some Constitutional prohibition on employer vaccine mandates, and there really isn't. Absent a Florida or California law, if Disney wants to, it can require its employees to be vaccinated; no employees have won a case otherwise and, by now, likely won't.
As to "questionable" decisions, the Supreme Court generally does not follow the passions of the moment; instead it works with time-tested legal principles (on July 1, the Court decided a case I had been working on for SEVEN YEARS). Not everyone will agree with it, but the current Court follows the same lengthy process almost all the time. And don't trust media coverage of the Supreme Court to give you a true picture of what's going on. The real story is always both more and less than is reported. Supreme Court practitioners (and Justices) literally think differently about these cases than reporters do. That's not a complaint about reporters; most lawyers have no clue how to handle a Supreme Court case and almost never do. The most important thing to every Supreme Court Justice is uniformity of the principles of law and jurisprudence across the Nation; that's why the overwhelming majority of cases the Court chooses to review feature differences between the regional Circuit Courts of Appeal ("conflicts among Circuits"). And most cases are decided unanimously; only a tiny few are the contentious fights reported in the media. As I pointed out in another thread, American courts have successfully navigated the vast majority of pandemic-related cases recently, most importantly by giving governmental authorities more leeway early on in the pandemic when the urgency was great, remedies few and far-between and the information limited, and by shifting gradually over time to requiring much more specific evidence of governmental need and narrowly-tailored remedies. The Courts, like all of us, were scrambling early on, but now they are relying more and more on tried-and-true constitutional principles. That was also true in cases dealing with last summer's riots and protests, and that trend also continues today.