Balkinization
an unanticipated consequence of
Jack M. Balkin
E-mail:
Jack Balkin: jackbalkin at yahoo.com
Bruce Ackerman bruce.ackerman at yale.edu
Ian Ayres ian.ayres at yale.edu
Mary Dudziak mary.l.dudziak at emory.edu
Joey Fishkin joey.fishkin at gmail.com
Heather Gerken heather.gerken at yale.edu
Mark Graber mgraber at law.umaryland.edu
Stephen Griffin sgriffin at tulane.edu
Bernard Harcourt harcourt at uchicago.edu
Scott Horton shorto at law.columbia.edu
Andrew Koppelman akoppelman at law.northwestern.edu
Marty Lederman marty.lederman at comcast.net
Sanford Levinson slevinson at law.utexas.edu
David Luban david.luban at gmail.com
Gerard Magliocca gmaglioc at iupui.edu
Jason Mazzone mazzonej at illinois.edu
Linda McClain lmcclain at bu.edu
John Mikhail mikhail at law.georgetown.edu
Frank Pasquale pasquale.frank at gmail.com
Nate Persily npersily at gmail.com
Michael Stokes Paulsen michaelstokespaulsen at gmail.com
Deborah Pearlstein dpearlst at princeton.edu
Rick Pildes rick.pildes at nyu.edu
Alice Ristroph alice.ristroph at shu.edu
Brian Tamanaha btamanaha at wulaw.wustl.edu
Mark Tushnet mtushnet at law.harvard.edu
Adam Winkler winkler at ucla.edu
Rarely has so much been given away by so few for so little. We can always hope that the Senate will exercise more restraint with respect to the filibuster, but don't count on that. The only people who will benefit from this are professors who write about Congress. Posted
9:29 PM
by Gerard N. Magliocca [link]
(13) comments
Monday, January 21, 2013
Our Exceptional Debt Ceiling, the Lessons of Comparative Constitutionalism, and Separation of Powers
Guest Blogger
Miguel Schor
According to
the Wikipedia entry on the debt ceiling crisis, the United States and Denmark are the
only nations in the world that have a debt ceiling (and Denmark apparently sets
its ceiling so high that it is a non-issue). The United States government
first decides on a budget and then authorizes the Treasury to borrow the money
needed to finance the budget. The rest
of the world apparently has come to the conclusion that if a nation enacts
spending programs, it also agrees to borrow the money to pay for it. This one step process was actually the rule
in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s and was known as the Gephardt
rule (named after former Congressman Dick Gephardt who implemented the
rule). The rule reverted back to the
2-step process when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995. This 2-step process has become a source of
serious friction in recent years. In
2011, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the creditworthiness of U.S. bonds after
concluding that “political brinkmanship” and partisan infighting made it
somewhat more likely that the United States would be unable to reach an
agreement on fiscal policy. In recent
months, House Republicans threatened to not raise the debt ceiling unless
spending cuts were enacted. They have
now backed away from that threat after sensibly concluding that a default would
be bad for the Nation and for the Republican Party. The debt ceiling, however, remains a real
problem. The comparative evidence and
our own historical experience suggest that the debt ceiling is unnecessary and
exacerbates political conflict.
I think there
is another reason why the debt ceiling is a bad law. There is a rich literature
criticizing separation of powers because it facilitates existential struggles
between legislatures and presidents. The seminal article is Juan Linz's
“The Perils of Presidentialism.” The
argument is that fixed terms for each branch facilitate democratic breakdown
since these terms do not correspond to the exigencies of political events and
each branch can claim that it has an electoral mandate to fix the nation's
problems. In a presidential system, snap elections cannot be used to have
the electorate resolve a crisis and politicians, protected from the voters by a
fixed term, may prefer conflict over co-operation. The conflict that presidentialism
institutionalizes has been less of a problem in the United States than in Latin
America (where presidentialism has a poor track record in sustaining democracy)
because the political culture in the United States was, at least for much of
the 20th century, less conflictual than had historically been the norm in Latin
America.
All systems of
governance, of course, suffer from pathologies and the potential of democratic
breakdown. But Linz's observations on how presidentialism can break down illustrate
how poorly the debt ceiling interfaces with our constitutional system. At
time T-1, a legislative majority decides to spend x dollars. At a
different (and later) time (T-2), a legislative minority that controls one
House decides to use the debt ceiling as a means to undo the spending enacted
by earlier majorities. The legislative minority
lacks the votes to enact its favored spending bill but can use the threat of destroying
the Nation’s creditworthiness to extract concessions from the majority party.
The point is that the "pathology" of presidential systems—which
is that they are susceptible to inter-branch, partisan conflict—is exacerbated
by statutes such as the debt ceiling that afford a political minority that
controls one branch of government the power to completely disrupt the operation
of government.
Miguel Schor is Professor of
Law at Drake University School of Law. You can reach him by e-mail at miguel.schor at drake.edu
I'm excited to share the cover image for my biography of John Bingham, which will be out in August. My apologies for breaking into this terrific online symposium.
State personhood laws pose a puzzle. These laws would establish fertilized eggs as
persons and, by doing so, would ban all abortions. Many states have consistently supported laws
restricting abortion care. Yet, thus far,
no personhood laws have passed. Why? I
am currently writing an article that offers a possible explanation.
I suggest that voters’ recognition of the implications of personhood
legislation for health issues other than abortion has led to personhood’s
defeat. In other words, opponents of
personhood proposals appear to have successfully reconnected abortion to
pregnancy care, contraception, fertility, and women’s health in general. Public concern over the “side effects” of
personhood laws seems to have persuaded even those opposed to abortion to
reject personhood legislation. If this
is so, personhood opponents may have struck on a strategy that could apply more
broadly. Various anti-abortion
regulations—not just personhood laws—have deleterious “side effects” on women’s
health. Focusing the public’s attention
on these side effects could not only create stronger support for access to
abortion care but could also better promote the full spectrum of women’s
healthcare needs. Read more » Posted
5:30 PM
by Guest Blogger [link]
Thursday, January 17, 2013
“Constitutional Frameworks” at Roe’s 40th Anniversary
Forty years ago the seven-Justice majority in Roe v. Wade held that “the Fourteenth
Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action”
protected the fundamental right of a woman to decide “whether or not to
terminate a pregnancy.” Ever since, constitutional scholars and commentators of
all stripes have critiqued and criticized the Court’s reasoning, in particular
its substantive due process approach to reproductive liberty. Some among Roe’s critics strongly support the
essential right the Court protected but find the constitutional protection more
appropriately rooted elsewhere in the Constitution – for example, in the
Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection or privileges or
immunities.
Such
alternative (or supplemental) theorizing at its best – as in recent works by
Reva Siegel and Jack Balkin – enriches understanding of the constitutionality
of governmental restrictions on women’s decisions about and access to
abortion. In fact, I sought to do the
same in coauthoring an amicus brief in the Court’s 1989 Webster case on behalf of “Seventy-seven Organizations Committed to
Women’s Equality.” Some progressive criticism of Roe, however, risks unintentionally undermining judicial protection
of women’s reproductive liberty. I offer here three suggestions for reviewing Roe on its fortieth anniversary.
The First Amendment has become the joker of constitutional litigation. It is now being applied with lethal results in all kinds of unpredictable circumstances. The consequences for the regulation of medicine, particularly in the area of reproductive and sexual rights, are enormous.
My research concerns public health
issues related to minority health, in particular, the relationship of stigma,
prejudice, and discrimination on the health of sexual minorities.In 2011 I was called to testify at a hearing
of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) on peer-to-peer violence
and bullying in schools.Research in
this area has been quite solid and shown consistent and robust findings:lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and
questioning (LGBTQ) youth fare worse than heterosexual youth.Compared with their heterosexual peers,
LGBTQ youth experience more stress, including violence bullying and, related to
this, worse health outcomes and academic performance.Most public health professionals agree that
LGBTQ youth can be helped if schools stem violence and bullying and, generally,
improve the school environment—making it more friendly and accommodating for
LGBTQ youth.
At the USCCR hearing I was taken by
surprise when invitees of the Republican members of the Commission opposed such
recommended interventions on behalf of LGBTQ youth. In particular, I was intrigued by concerns
that efforts to improve the school environment for LGBTQ students, aimed at
reducing stigma and prejudice, raised First Amendment concerns. I was particularly struck by Professor Eugene
Volokh’s testimony,
which singled out one of my statement to the committee, saying “[O]ne of the
things that [Meyer noted] is that one of the dangers to the mental health of
gay students is anti-gay stigma and prejudice. I think that's probably right,
but the consequence of that is that if you take that logic seriously, then
again speech, whether on campus or off campus, that expresses and contributes
to the stigma of prejudice would be punishable.”
For those of us who use the language and tools of human rights in
social justice advocacy, progress is a kind of leitmotif of our work: aren’t we
aiming for better places, better things?
In the last decade, sexual
rights has begun to function globally as one of the new markers of ‘progress’
in contemporary human rights work. From
being a set of rights which were interpreted
into more accepted rights (health rights, reproductive health, rights of
bodily integrity, rights of association and expression) sexual rights, mostly in the guise either of
women’s sexual and reproductive rights or
‘gay rights’ are emerging as clear independent standards.
This emergence is
hard fought and deeply prized, and yet I am reluctant to use the word
“progress” in this work. After
twenty-five years of this work, I think rights work can be happiness-making
without the certainty that it sticks as ‘progress’. Some of my reluctance to
trumpet sexual rights as progress lies in my ambivalent relationship to the
construct of progress generally, and some lies in the particular role sexual
rights are playing in global politics.
While adoption and the use of reproductive technologies grows as a path to parenting for LGBT people and same-sex couples, U.S. Census Bureau data show substantial differences between same-sex couples who adopt and other same-sex couples. While more than 15,000 same-sex couples are currently raising an adopted child under age 18 (according to my analyses of data from the 2010 American Community Survey), nearly 74,000 same-sex couples are raising a biological or stepchild. Same-sex couples with biological or step children show evidence of substantial economic disadvantage while those with adoptive same-sex parents are economically advantaged.
It was disappointing, if not
truly surprising, that the World
Day of Peace message with which Pope Benedict XVI welcomed this new
year warns, among other things, that those who would treat loving same-sex
couples and their families equally under civil law are “harm[ing] and help[ing]
to destabilize marriage.” That isn’t a
new claim. It still echoes in nearly
every marriage equality case, even as the social, scientific, and legal records
ever-more-thoroughly show it is baseless.
Then the Day of Peace message
adds a more sharply cutting charge—that civil marriage equality “constitutes an
offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and
peace.” I scan the international
headlines. There are wars raging and
constant, and horrifying assaults on justice.
But lesbian and gay couples in love and building families are nowhere
the cause.
In my intervention, I plan to
unpack the “child-protective” argument relating to same-sex marriage by using
the case study of Hollingsworth v. Perry,
the federal challenge to California’s Proposition 8. Insistently present
throughout the Prop 8 campaign in California was the slogan “Protect Our
Children.” Part of the force of this slogan was that, framed at that level of
abstraction, it is impossible to contest—who, after all, does not wish to
protect children? Yet a broad spectrum of individuals—ranging from the
plaintiffs to an expert for the Proponents of Prop 8—have maintained that
“protecting our children” can be an argument for, rather than against, same-sex
marriage. One useful aspect of the federal trial concerning Prop 8 was that it
forced both sides to unpack the question of which children were being protected
from what. Several possibilities emerged:
A
trial court concludes it is in the best interests of four daughters to change
custody from their mother to their father because their mother was “going
through a transsexual change” from female to male. The mother had changed her name to Mark, and,
after the father petitioned for the custody change, Mark married a woman. Reversing, the appeals court quotes the
statutory requirement that “the court shall not consider conduct of a
proposed custodian that does not affect his relationship with the child,"
and finds no adverse impact on the mother’s relationship with the children or
on their emotional development.
A trial court terminates the parental rights of a
father after he undergoes sex reassignment surgery and becomes a woman. Affirming, the state supreme court finds that
“Suzanne, in a very real sense, has terminated her own parental rights as a
father. It was strictly Tim Daly's
choice to discard his fatherhood and assume the role of a female who could
never be either mother or sister to his daughter.”
Contrary to the recommendation of the
guardian ad litem, and in spite of finding that the father was the more
nurturing parent, a trial court awards primary custody of two children to their
mother rather than their father, who was transitioning to become a woman. The
trial court reasons that "[Robbie] has indicated she will be undergoing
sexual reassignment surgery sometime in the very near future. [The] surgery may
be everything she has hoped for, or it may be disastrous. No one knows what is
ahead, and the impact of gender reassignment surgery on the children is
unknown." Affirming, the appeals
court finds that the trial court properly “focused on the children's need for ‘environmental
and parental stability’."
The
above snapshots are from three cases, one decided in 1973, one in 1986, and one
in 2007. Which case do you imagine goes
with which year? Take a moment and think
about that before you keep reading.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas In Lawrence, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas criminal statute prohibiting same-sex sodomy, concluding that “two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engage in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle…. are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
Much has changed since Lawrence. Though Justice Kennedy insisted that the decision did not involve “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter,” most recognized that the decision laid the foundation for same-sex marriage. Indeed, a few months after Lawrence was announced, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down that state’s law limiting civil marriage to same-sex couples. Citing Lawrence for support, the majority noted that “[w]hether and whom to marry, how to express sexual intimacy, and whether and how to establish a family—these are among the most basic of every individual’s liberty and due process rights.” Today, more than ten U.S. jurisdictions recognize same-sex marriages, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in two cases that seem poised to resolve the question of legal recognition of same-sex marriage for purposes of federal law and the U.S. Constitution.
If legal recognition of same-sex marriage—which once seemed impossible—seems now to be in the offing, in what new, uncharted territory might Lawrence take us in the next ten years?
Writing in 1943, Dr. Charlotte
Silverman, a researcher at the U.S. Children’s Bureau, argued that one
troubling consequence of the absence of fair maternity leave policies in workplaces
was that, faced with the prospect of losing
their jobs, more women were choosing to have abortions.Better leave policies, she argued, would mean
fewer abortions.
Five years later, in the aftermath
of World War II, when a congressional subcomittee held hearings on a bill that
would have guaranteed paid maternity leave to female government workers,
Genrose Gehri, the director of a home for unmarried mothers, was questioned about
whether paid maternity leave would encourage more women to avoid marriage. Gehri dismissed these concerns. “I know that every time such a bill is
considered,” she testified, “there is always the fear lest the unmarried be
included in these benefits, that illegitimacy will be encouraged. I think there is no need for such a fear as
that. The unmarried girl who has a second
child in my judgment, is a sick person.”
More than forty lawsuits
blanket the country with various institutions – ranging from Notre Dame to a
chain of arts and crafts stores to archdioceses to a mining company –
challenging the requirement
that they include prescription birth control among the services covered by the
insurance they provide employees. In every
case, the plaintiffs claim the contraception requirement violates their
religious freedom.
These challenges to the contraception requirement are the
most prominent of a rash of cases challenging anti-discrimination rules in
the name of religion. We see bakeries
and bucolic inns closing their doors to same-sex couples, Christian schools
firing employees
who are pregnant and unmarried, and nurses protesting even taking the blood
pressure of abortion patients. In every
case, the refusal to provide services or equal treatment is rooted in religious
beliefs.
The cases pose this fundamental question: Does the right to religious freedom include
the right to impose your views on others?
Does it include the right to impose your views on a diverse workforce? On customers and patients seeking your services
you offer the public? Does it include
the right to close the door – in your office or your bakery or your emergency
room – because you disagree with the person seeking services?
In 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote an essay titled, To Live Not by Lies (original here). This was not legal analysis; Solzhenitsyn had bigger tasks at hand. Rather, it was a call to his countrymen to refuse to participate in the spread of what they saw as lies:
Let each of us choose his own path through our timidity: will he remain the conscious servant of the lie (of course, not because of his inclination, but to feed his family, to raise his children in the spirit of the lie!), or has the time arrived for him to shake himself off and become an honest person, deserving of respect of his children and of his contemporaries. And from that day forward ... he will not write, not sign, not print through any means even a single phrase that distorts, in his opinion, the truth ... [or] in painting, sculpture, photography, music, or through technological ... depict, accompany, or retransmit even a single lying thought, not a single distortion of the truth, that he recognizes.
Only a refusal to participate in the spread of lies, Solzhenitsyn argued, could help heal not just a broken social and political system, but the integrity, self-respect, and political efficacy of the people who were broken by it. And such a refusal will also embolden others to overcome their fear, by seeing that they are not alone in their views.
The very same insight, it seems to me, is at the heart of two different rights claims in America today.
“Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Some on
the Christian Right might claim to take that injunction to heart when it comes
to us lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (or LGBT) persons. They
love us, but they hate what we may do. They say they won’t shun us simply
for having what some of them trivializingly dub “same-sex attractions,” or for
believing we have a gender identity different from what they take our sex to
be. But heaven forbid we should act on any of that, marrying our partners
or bringing our bodies or identity documents into better conformity with our
identities. We may think they’re thus trying to condemn us to lonely,
inauthentic lives. But they’d tell us that we’re mistaken, that true
nature and God’s plan for us require us to eschew sexual intimacy or daily
living in the forms we find natural, even if some of them may grudgingly concede
that we’re oriented toward those forms. “The lonely homosexual” is the
image that “reparative therapy” or other efforts to “cure” or condition gay
people not to act on our orientations hold out as a deterrent to people
embracing a gay identity and entering same-sex relationships. (See, for
example, David B. Cruz, Controlling Desires: Sexual Orientation Conversion andthe Limits of Knowledge and Law, 72 So. Cal. L. Rev. 1297, 1366 (1999), ).
Beginning with Griswold v. Connecticut, and continuing with Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas, people have criticized decisions protecting sexual freedom because they have no basis in the text of the Constitution.
In fact all of these decisions are grounded in the text of the Constitution, but unwise Supreme Court decisions have obscured the connections. Read more » Posted
8:35 AM
by JB [link]
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The 10th Anniversary of Balkinization
JB
Today marks the 10th anniversary of Balkinization.
Although the blog officially started on January 10th, 2003, the first substantiveposts, on the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, were written on January 13th.
It is therefore fitting that 10 years later, we're hosting a series of essays connected with an conference on sexual liberty and equality commemorating Roe's 40th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas.
In the fall of 2002, my center, the Yale Information Society Project, had hosted one of the first academic conferences on blogging, Revenge of the Blog, which featured, among others, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, and Mickey Kaus.
Balkinization began as a result of that conference, and especially as a result of a conversation a few months later with Glenn Reynolds, who had been blogging for awhile, and Eugene Volokh, who had just started his group blog that summer. The number of legal scholars in blogging was still very small: in addition to Glenn and Eugene, Larry Lessig and Larry Solum had also begun blogging in 2002.
Glenn, Eugene and I were sitting at a bar in the convention hotel where the American Association of Law Schools convention was meeting, talking about how blogs were likely to change the legal and political world. Glenn said "You should do this Jack, you'd be good at it." Since Glenn knows a great deal about blogging, I took his advice. My wife Margret Wolfe suggested the blog's name.
I was the blog's only writer until late June of 2004, and for that reason I signed my posts with my initials JB, a practice which I have continued to this day.
Writing a solo blog is hard work, as anyone who has done it knows, and it soon became clear that the blog would not continue without additional contributors. Cass Sunstein wrote the first guest post. I invited several people to join me in July 2004, and by the end of the summer, Balkinization was established as a group blog.
Since then we've largely stuck to our mission: providing serious commentary on legal and political issues, especially those related to the Constitution.
I'd like to thank all of the contributors over the last ten years who have maintained the blog's high standards and scholarly approach, and all of the millions of readers who have visited us over the years.
2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the
decision in Roe v. Wade and the 10th
of the ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. These shared anniversaries—which arrive just
as the Supreme Court considers same-sex couples’ right to marry—provide an
opportunity to reflect on the significance of the ways in which legal arguments
are framed.
While the
decision in Roe v. Wade was grounded
in privacy doctrine, plaintiff’s counsel and amici also had raised sex
discrimination arguments. Even though
the Court chose not to reach these equality claims in Roe, Justice Blackmun subsequently recognized in his separate
opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey
that “restrictions on a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy also implicate
constitutional guarantees of gender equality.”
Similarly, in her dissent in Gonzales
v. Carhart, Justice Ginsberg wrote that “Legal challenges to undue
restrictions on abortion procedures … center on a woman’s autonomy to determine
her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.” Some have wondered whether Roe might have fared an easier future
had the decision been grounded in such equality arguments instead.
On the
40th anniversary of Roe v.
Wade, I am struck by the narrow vision of reproductive justice that the
case has often come to signify. Roe,
which ensured access to safe and affordable contraceptive care and abortion
services, is a significant milestone in the ongoing struggle for women’s equity
and autonomy in the United
States. But while the decision itself
emphasized the broad liberty, privacy and dignity interests associated with
procreation and parenting, many mainstream feminist organizations have focused
on the freedom not to bear children
(via abortion and contraception). An equally important aspect of reproductive
justice involves the right to parent.
For women of color, this right continues to be burdened through policies and
discourses that deny their reproductive capacity and denigrate their identities
as mothers. Indeed, notwithstanding the significance of Roe, women of color continue to struggle to have the full scope of
their reproductive autonomy respected by the state, particularly with respect
to their choice to have children or become parents, and all too often this
struggle has gone unremarked or unnoticed in mainstream feminist organizing.
The failure to truly center the concerns of women of color is not
insignificant; it not only constrains the reproductive autonomy of the most
vulnerable, but constrains a more expansive articulation of reproductive
autonomy and justice as well.
Can we really avoid conflict by avoiding
courts? In June 2010, as the Proposition 8 trial was wrapping up in a San
Francisco courtroom, the Federal District Judge, Vaughn Walker, put this
question to Ted Olson, who was about to make his closing argument on behalf of
the two same-sex couples seeking the right to marry:
“Isn’t
the danger . . . to the position that you are taking . . . not that you’re
going to lose this case, either here or at the Court of Appeals or at the
Supreme Court, but that you might win it? And, as in other areas where the
Supreme Court has ultimately constitutionalized something that touches upon
highly-sensitive social issues, and taken that issue out of the political realm,
that all that has happened is that the forces, the political forces that
otherwise have been frustrated, have been generated and built up this pressure,
and have, as in a subject matter that I’m sure you’re familiar with, plagued
our politics for 30 years – isn’t the same danger here with this issue?”
Ted
Olson replied: “I think the case that you’re referring to has to do with
abortion.”
“It
does, indeed, said the judge.
Running
through commentary on the cert grants in Perry
and Windsor are continual
references to Roe v. Wade. “Watch
out! Don’t go there! Look what happened 40 years ago when the Supreme Court
granted women the right to abortion.” The Roe-centered
backlash narrative, it seems,is the trump
card in many discussions of the marriage cases. But what do we mean by
“backlash” in the context of a Supreme Court decision? What might an accurate account of what occurred before and after Roe v. Wade actually have to impart? And
why should we care, on Roe’s 40th
anniversary, Lawrence’s 10th, and on the eve
of Perry and Windsor, about getting this story right?
The Supreme Court recently announced it will consider two
cases involving marriage for same-sex couples.
In United States v. Windsor,
the plaintiff challenges Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act,
which withholds federal recognition to same-sex couples’ valid, state-law
marriages. In Hollingsworth v. Perry, the plaintiffs challenge California’s
Proposition 8, which built a prohibition on same-sex marriage into the state
constitution.
A core disagreement between same-sex couples seeking
marriage recognition and social conservatives defending those couples’
exclusion centers on the meaning of marriage itself. In both cases, the defenders of the marriage
prohibitions – the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group in Windsor and the official proposition proponents in Perry – argue that the discriminatory
marriage laws should be upheld because they cement a traditional view of
marriage geared toward procreation and dual-gender childrearing. Only different-sex couples, they claim, fulfill
these purposes of marriage. Those
challenging the laws counter that same-sex couples fit within the contours of
marriage, forming loving and committed relationships that are marriage-like in
important ways. Accordingly, the issue
of whether marriage can and should include same-sex couples involves an inquiry
into the content of marriage and the function marriage serves today.
Pope
Benedict XVI recently issued two important messages, one on the occasion of
Christmas and the other in celebration of World Peace Day. Both messages concentrated on the serious
threats “to justice and peace” confronting society in the twenty-first century,
including, most prominently, the threat of same-sex marriage.
The Pope warned that, although
lamentable in and of itself, the spread of same-sex marriage was symptomatic of
a deeper “crisis” in the modern world: namely, the dissolution of traditional
sex roles and the rise of feminist ideology. Before there was same-sex marriage, the Pope asserted,
there was Simone de Beauvoir, who paved the way for same-sex marriage by
suggesting that sex roles are a product of culture, rather than nature, and
that one’s life path ought not to be determined by his or her biological sex. The Pope called on people of all faiths to
resist this feminist “attack” on traditional sex and family roles, and to pursue
social policies that reflect and reinforce “gender complementarity,” in
marriage and all other walks of life.
The Pope
may not have been aware, when he issued these messages, that he was taking
sides in longstanding debate among legal scholars and gay rights advocates
about whether discrimination against gays and lesbians should be understood as
a form of sex discrimination. But he
was. Ironically, the Pope’s position in
this debate aligns him most closely with feminist scholars, who have argued that
much of the disapprobation of homosexuality is a
reaction to the way in which it violates gender norms, and that opposition to
same-sex marriage is fueled in significant part by a desire to preserve traditional
conceptions of men’s and women’s roles.
Many of the Supreme Court’s more recent decisions suggest
that the Court has adopted Justice Scalia’s ideas about how it should decide if
the due process clause gives special protection to an aspect of freedom not
explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. That idea is that the Court should: 1)
describe the potentially protected liberty in as fact-specifically narrow way
as is possible; and 2) then decide if the liberty is one that history shows has
been traditionally protected by American society. See Michael
H. at 122-124 for a good example of Justice Scalia’s idea. See, Glucksberg
and McDonald v The City of Chicago at
for examples of plurality opinions invoking it.
It is a bit odd that much of the Court relies for its
substantive due process analysis on the ideas of one who thinks the entire
enterprise is illegitimate “judicial usurpation.” See Justice Scalia’s
dissenting opinion in City of Chicago v.
Morales, at 85. Putting that aside, while Justice Scalia’s approach got six
votes in Glucksberg¸ Chief Justice
Rehnquist’s formulation of it there wasn’t as tightly restricted as Justice
Scalia probably would have liked. The Glucksberg majority called for a
“careful” description of the claimed right (at 721), not a narrow one (Justice
Scalia’s dissent in Morales at
85). And it described history and a
careful description as “primary features” of due process analysis. It did not quite say that either was
essential although it goes on to rule as if “being deeply rooted” in American
“history and tradition” is essential (Glucksberg
at 720-721 and 723-25).
However, when push has come to constitutional shove, at
least two of the Justices who joined the Glucksberg
majority made it clear that they don’t think history is everything, or
necessarily essential. Just eleven
months after signing on to Glucksberg,
Justice Kennedy, joined by Justice O’Connor (who was the sixth vote in Glucksberg) wrote that “…history and
tradition are the starting point, but not in all cases the ending point of the
substantive due process inquiry.” County of Sacramento v. Lewis at
857-858. Justice Kennedy seemed to take
this farther, though in a pretty unclear doctrinal context, in Lawrence at 571-2 (“In all events, we
think that our laws and traditions of the past half century are of most
relevance here.”).
Roe v. Wade grounds constitutional
protections for women’s decision whether to end a pregnancy in the Due Process
Clause. But in the four decades since Roe,
the Supreme Court has come to recognize the abortion right as an equality
right, as well as a liberty right.
The sex equality argument asks whether abortion
restrictions are shaped solely by the state’s interest in protecting potential
life, or whether they might also reflect constitutionally suspect judgments
about women. (Does the state act
consistently to protect potential life in contexts not involving women who
resist motherhood? Does it support those
who bear and care for future generations?
Or might abortion restrictions reflect traditional sex-role stereotypes
about sex, caregiving, or decision-making around motherhood?)
The equality argument is also concerned about the
gendered impact of abortion restrictions.
The equality argument observes that abortion restrictions deprive women
of control over the timing of motherhood and so predictably exacerbate the
inequalities in educational, economic, and political life engendered by
childbearing and childrearing. The sex
equality argument asks whether, before depriving women of control over the
timing of motherhood, the state has taken steps to ameliorate the impact of
compelled motherhood on women.
Given these concerns, restrictions on
abortion implicate constitutional values of equality as well as liberty. Equality concerns can be vindicated in the
course of protecting liberty, or as an independent ground of constitutional
concern.
Supreme Court case law now recognizes
equality arguments for the abortion right based on the Due Process Clause. But a growing number of Justices have also
asserted equality arguments for the abortion right independently based on the
Equal Protection Clause.
I've posted my new article, Sanford Levinson's Second Thoughts About Constitutional Faith, on SSRN. It's a review of Sandy's republication of Constitutional Faith, with the new ending that states that he has lost his faith in the American Constitution.
Reviewing a book in which the author has significantly changed the ending was both intellectually challenging and fun; and it also gave me the chance to talk about larger issues of political faith, a recurringtheme in my work, and the topic of a long conversation between Sandy and me over the years.
Here is the abstract:
Sanford Levinson's 1988 book, Constitutional Faith, described the U.S. Constitution as America's civil religion and closed with Levinson's statement of faith in the Constitution as "a commitment to taking political conversation seriously." In 2011, Levinson republished the book with an afterword in which he renounced his faith in the Constitution, denounced Americans' reverential attitude toward the document, and called for a new constitutional convention. In all other respects, however, the text of the book remains the same.
The afterword to the 2011 edition transforms the significance of all of the previous chapters and their arguments. It changes the location and the object of Levinson's political faith, and it alters the story that Levinson wants Americans to tell themselves about the meaning of American history. This essay reexamines the book's arguments in light of its new conclusion.
Once people lose faith in a relationship or an institution, they move from the "middle game" -- in which participants make mutual concessions to keep the relationship going -- to the "endgame," where participants seek to protect their interests and make a successful transition to a new life. In the same way, once people lose faith in the Constitution, it can no longer function as America's civil religion or as an aspirational source of values; instead it becomes a modus vivendi, a transitional state of affairs on the way to what participants hope will be a better political order.
The majority of voters in November’s
election voted in favor for two kinds of decency: one a fiscal decency by
asking the well-off to shoulder a larger proportion of the tax burden, and the
other a kind of sexual decency by sanctioning the rights of same-sex couples to
the blessings and benefits of civil marriage.
But a politics of decency can be tricky business. Just as the lame-duck
Congress debated how we might avoid the self-imposed danger of the looming
“fiscal cliff,” another kind of danger has emerged on the front pages of our
daily papers. The illustrious career of CIA Director and retired
four-star Army General David Petraeus’ dissolved in disgrace when it was
revealed that he had had an “extra-marital” affair. Many found it deeply
troubling that Petraeus’ career ended in humiliation on account of adultery,
not the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the U.S. government in the Petraeus-led military
campaigns in Afghanistan and
Iraq,
or the expansion of the CIA’s Predator drone fleet. The Center for
Constitutional Rights and the ACLU have filed a lawsuit charging senior CIA and
military officials, including Petraeus, with violating the Constitution and
international law when they authorized and directed drone strikes that resulted
in these deaths as part of a broader practice of extrajudicial “targeted killing”
by the United States. But adultery, not these global acts of illegal
violence and murder, pushed General Petraeus out of public service.
Forty years ago, I had the privilege of serving as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. during the Supreme Court’s 1972-73 Term. It was an interesting year for sex at the Court. Three issues in particular bedeviled the justices that year: obscenity, abortion and the status of women under the Equal Protection Clause.
After a (very) bumpy decade, the Guantanamo military commissions are again at an important juncture. The government must decide whether to appeal a D.C. Circuit ruling that precludes bringing war crimes charges against detainees that, well, never committed war crimes (i.e., most of the remaining 166 Guantanamo detainees). Should the government decline to seek Supreme Court review, it would help limit the already considerable damage done by military commissions. It could also, however, have the unintended effect of further embedding the existing system of prolonged indefinite detention without trial.
You will find below the final schedule for the symposium that will be held at the University of Texas Law School beginning two weeks from tomrrow. All events are free and open to the public. If you are planning to attend the lunch session where Larry Lessig will speak, we would very much appreciate your "registering" by sending an email to that effect to me at slevinson@law.utexas.edu or mhendryx@law.utexas.edu. We won't turn anyone away, but lunches will go first to those who registered. It is my hope that the events will be (at least) live-streamed and availablel thereafter. There is certainly no reason, as we contemplate further budgetary debacles, to believe that the topic has become irrelevant, alas. The website, https://www.utexas.edu/law/conferences/governable/ should, fairly soon, have biographies and, more importantly, bibligraphies of the impressive array of writings produced by the participants. If, as I assume, most readers will not be able to make it to Austin, please feel free to linform any Austinites you know of the invent.
In recent weeks, the world has been captivated by the
emergence of the Idle
No More movement. Indigenous people and their allies in Canada and around
the world have been engaging in a wave of protest actions. These protests, which include marches,
vigils, road blocks, railway blocks, flashmobs and the prominent hunger strike
of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, are raising a number of significant
issues. Initially, the movement was a
response to the Harper government’s introduction of Bill C-45, legislation that
would significantly weaken environmental protection laws in Canada. As the movement has grown, its message has
broadened to raise questions about indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection
more generally, both in Canada and around the world where indigenous people
struggle against colonization and environmental degradation.
Movements against colonization raise significant questions
for scholars studying the legal regulation of sexuality and family. The imposition of gender norms and
family formation norms and the use of sexual
violence as a tool of war have been significant to processes of
colonization. The depiction of cultures
and peoples targeted for colonization as “backward” in terms of sexuality and family
formation has been a rationalization for colonization, and has often included
portraying indigenous women as needing
to be saved by the colonizers from their own families and cultures. These methods and rationalizations are
visible in the history of the colonization of North America where the Idle No
More movement has been most visible so far, but we can also hear these
rationales deployed to justify the war in Afghanistan,
proposed war
with Iran, and in rationales
for Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
These dynamics are particularly interesting in the context
of a contemporary gay and lesbian rights framework in the US and its global
influence. As many scholars have noted,
the gay and lesbian rights framework has increasingly moved toward demands for
formal legal equality in recent decades, particularly focusing on demands for
military participation and access to legal marriage. There has been a great
deal of critique of these demands by a range of feminist, anti-racist, queer
and trans scholars. One aspect of this
critique that is particularly interesting in the context of the Idle No More
movement’s growing momentum is how these demands speak or fail to speak to the
quest for sexual freedom for those imagining freedom from an anti-colonial
perspective.
Ostensibly, the contemporary gay and lesbian rights agenda
developed from the sexual liberation movements of the 1960’s and ‘70’s that are
remembered in images from the Stonewall Riots where queer and trans people
fought back against police harassment and criminalization. As it developed, its vision of “freedom” has
become more aligned with joining the apparatuses of colonial occupation than
fighting them. The US military literally operationalizes US colonial and
imperial violence, and marriage enforces the family formation norms for the
settler colonial state by disbursing essential benefits to the population based
on whether we conform to that norm. As
the Idle No More movement and other anti-colonial movements such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement
continue to grow, queer and trans politics faces interesting questions about
how various approaches to conceptualizing sexual freedom relate to
anti-colonial agendas that seek to dismantle the apparatuses in which certain
lesbian and gay rights campaigns and court cases seek gay and lesbian
inclusion. These questions are particularly interesting now, as gay and lesbian
people are increasingly articulated as those
that need saving in colonial discourses.
Access to legal marriage and military participation for gays and
lesbians are now often used as measuring sticks for whether or not a country
respects human
rights, and human rights enforcement rationalizations are a popular
justification for military intervention.
The Idle No More movement’s emergence in this moment provides an
opportunity for reflection on the relationship between commitments to sexual
freedom and commitments to self-determination and decolonization.
Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. You can reach him by email at spaded at seattleu.edu