What was the original purpose of the constitutional convention? - remarkable
View Citing Opinions. CourtListener is a project of Free Law Project , a federally-recognized c 3 non-profit. We rely on donations for our financial security. Donate Now. Sign In Register. Filed: April 14th, Precedential Status: Precedential. what was the original purpose of the constitutional convention?
A re there sufficient reasons for the Court to hold that the unborn are persons within the meaning of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Edward Whelan continues to doubt it. He also questions whether such a holding would have much legal effect. Since questions of strategy have not been my concern, I will continue to say nothing about them, save originaal any strategy about anything should be aligned with the truth; my first and second read more together argue that there are here two truths converging on the same result. Wade in a maelstrom of factual error and bad argument, corresponds to the facts about the unborn, and their place in constututional rationally defensible scheme of justice—a place which, given their situation and circumstances, is not simple but ought not to be denied by simply conferring on those in a position to destroy them the lawful authority to do so.
Whelan, I am sure with good intent, begins with a misstep. I hope that Chief Justice Shaw's ruling in will be taken to heart; I introduced and quoted it in my first essay:.
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Whelan's main point in part I is that my citation of cases from the s does not explain away the absence of appeals to the amendment by pro-life abortion law reformers 15—20 years earlier, at or soon after the amendment's ratification. I agree that further research on that period is very desirable. But Whelan's references to the s do not do justice to the cases I cited from the early s, evidencing the attitudes not merely of judges but of everyone—passionate litigants, for example, who battled discrimination against women by arguing all the way up to the Supreme Court, and who appealed all the time to the Fourteenth Amendment's first sentence but never to its fourth sentence equal protection. He does not attend to the point of my first essay's discussion of this: The meaning of the term was fixed by convention, particularly because what was under consideration was not someone's life, liberty, property, or protection, but simply enumeration.
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But no matter: No such ingenious reason is needed nor, I am confident, was it in mind. As for Field's corporate-veil-piercing theory used in Pembinathe Supreme Court toyed with it for a couple of decades but threw it over forever in in Southern Railway v.
His first sentence concedes that under common law, abortion was a form of homicide. And as we will see in a moment, so do the standard Penal Codes that everywhere have replaced the common law. To what was the original purpose of the constitutional convention? what I had in mind, consider first the example Whelan selects: California. Obviously, both i and ii are manifest denials of equal protection— Roe itself says so—and would, as a routine consequence of acknowledged unborn Fourteenth Amendment personhood, be struck down expressly or by implication, and cease to be part of the law of California.
It is to be expected that California would promptly enact some moderated substitute for the invalidated i and ii. But to avoid being itself struck down, the new legislation would have to move well away from California's present Roe-Casey abortion regulation and bring itself under the principles of fairness that regulate conflicts with the vital interests of persons who, though differently situated, are for nixon and brezhnev think entitled to the constitutional-standard equal protection that Roe defined as incompatible with the kind of laws that it itself authorized. So let us see how my account would apply there.
NY Penal Law, as amended in to strip out remaining references in section Thus the default position would be that most abortions would be murder. New York, if dissatisfied with the applicability here of the defenses of excuse and justification available to anyone charged with murder, would thus be strongly incentivized to enact new legislation making a fair accommodation between the rights of mother and child, recognizing both their basic and constitutional recognized equality as persons and their significantly differing situations and legitimate interests.
Whelan postulates states legislating to make abortion providers' certificates of risk of death or serious bodily harm conclusive evidence of a justification rooted in harm to the motheror to make criminal abortion subject only to a derisory fine. All that need be said about these examples is that they are manifest instances of denial of equal protection. Distinctions among the unborn, and between the unborn and the newly born, in matters of life and death—like distinctions between the newly born and the toddler or you and me in such matters—are and would be subject to heightened scrutiny.
America’s "Great Men" and the Constitutional Convention
Some distinctions would survive an evenhanded and careful scrutiny. Others, like Whelan's examples, would not with the result that this legislative attempt to escape from the default-to-murder would fail and the legislature would need to consider trying again, more fairly. The whole situation we are discussing would be new, but would essentially amount to no more and no less than a new field for applying routine conventio? of litigious debate and resolution of disputed questions about equality of persons.
Finally, he asks what the Supreme Court can do about prosecutors who announce that they will never prosecute abortion.]
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