Blog Round-Up
Peter Lattman of The WSJ Law Blog discusses what he believes is the current Court’s “green” period here.
Talcott Camp and Brigitte Amiri of the ACLU Foundation have this piece up at the ACSBlog about the two abortion cases that will be argued this coming Wednesday.
Here, Eugene Volokh highlights this forthcoming paper of his regarding whether the Roe and Casey decisions create a right to “abortion-as-self-defense.” The paper will be published in April in the Harvard Law Review.
Finally, David Lat of Above the Law has used the results of his site’s “Most Favorite” and “Least Favorite” Justice polls to create a “Net Popularity Score” for each member of the Court; the results are here. After looking at the results, Ann Althouse wonders “Why the antagonism toward Ruth Bader Ginsburg?”
While I agree with Professor Volokh that there should be (and is) a constitutional right to self defense, and that applies, based on the common law understanding, even if the victim isn’t morally culpable, I don’t think the analogy should extend to the organ market because a person’s right to self defense certainly doesn’t extend to endangering other people who don’t pose a direct threat. (Certainly few would argue, for instance, that I have a right to kill someone to steal his or her kidney.) Allowing the selling of organs can cause all sorts of harms, and the people victimized by the opening of the market pose no direct threat to those who need the organs. I do agree with the DC circuit decision in Eschenbach, however, that a terminally ill person has a right to potentially life-saving medication. As long as safeguards are put into place to make sure that no-one who won’t die without the medication gets it anyway, there is no party who doesn’t pose a threat (indeed, no party at all) being harmed by the “self-defense” accessing of the medication. I think that a very strong case could be made, however, that no amount of safeguards would prevent people who really shouldn’t be selling their “spare” organs from doing so.
Comment by Jacob Berlove — November 3, 2006 @ 12:13 am