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The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Updated)

Last week the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian legal group, filed a petition for certiorari in which it asked the Court to review a Sixth Circuit decision, which rejected the group’s claim that a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014 is unconstitutional.  With similar challenges currently pending in the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits, it seems likely that the Court will take up the constitutionality of the Act at some point in the future  perhaps even during the upcoming Term.  During the next two weeks, SCOTUSblog will host an online symposium on the Act and the Court:  when and whether the Court is likely to review the Act, and how it might rule if it does.  As with last month’s online symposium on Arizona’s immigration law, we have sought contributors with a variety of viewpoints, and we would like to express our appreciation to them for sharing their views with our readers and with us.

Those contributors are:

Jonathan Adler, Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Cory Andrews, Washington Legal Foundation

Erwin Chemerinsky, University of California – Irvine School of Law

Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School

Charles Fried, Harvard Law School

Abbe R. Gluck and Gillian Metzger, Columbia Law School

Mark Hall, Wake Forest University School of Law

Dawn Johnsen, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Bradley Joondeph, Santa Clara University School of Law

Orin Kerr, The George Washington University Law School

David Kopel, Independence Institute

John Kroger, Attorney General of Oregon

Robert Levy, Cato Institute

Stephen Presser, Northwestern University

Elizabeth Price Foley, Florida International University College of Law

David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, Baker Hostetler

Robert Schapiro, Emory University School of Law

Steven Schwinn, John Marshall Law School

Ilya Shapiro, Cato Institute

Neil S. Siegel, Duke Law School

Ilya Somin, George Mason University School of Law

Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School

Adam Winkler, University of California Los Angeles School of Law

Elizabeth Wydra, Constitutional Accountability Center

Next week we will feature responses to the posts published this week.  All posts will be available as they are published on our homepage.  To view all of the posts in the series at once, select “Special Features” from our dropdown menu at the top of the page, and select The Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

This is the second in our summer series of online symposia.  In addition to our series on Arizona v. United States, which ran last month, we also plan to host symposia on the battle over the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, as well as the impact of recent class action and arbitration decisions at the Court.

Recommended Citation: Kiera Flynn, The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Updated), SCOTUSblog (Aug. 1, 2011, 3:24 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2011/08/the-constitutionality-of-the-affordable-care-act/