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“Pro-abortion and anti-abortion states may enact policies that have secondary implications for other states,” said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University. “Just as California said, ‘I don’t approve of pork raised in an unethical manner,’ some states might say, ‘We can’t do business with this or that state,’ because of their abortion policies. I can’t,” he added.
Civil rights attorney James Bopp Jr. largely agreed. “On the face of it, I think it would be more likely for a pro-life state to regulate, for example, the interstate sale of abortion-inducing chemicals,” he said, as long as ties to the state of origin still remain. rice field.
At a superficial level, the outcome of this lawsuit tells defenders on both sides of the abortion rights debate that their efforts are more morally important than those at stake in pork-related legal confrontations. , thus providing a rhetorical opportunity to argue that it should be evaluated in a similar way. Blessings from the royal court.
California’s ballot measure, passed in 2018 with 63% support, aimed to improve conditions for calves, egg-laying hens and breeding pigs. However, in what is known as the Supreme Court case, National Pork Producers Council vs. Rossfocused primarily on long-term confinement of pregnant sows in immovable pens.
The case focused on a vague and ambiguous constitutional principle called the dormant commerce clause. This has been interpreted as limiting the ability of states to formulate policies that interfere with economic activity outside their borders.
A majority of the judges concluded that the pork producer lobby had failed to clearly demonstrate that California’s law places a significant burden on interstate commerce.
“What this means in the context of abortion is that if Alabama made it a crime for someone in California to mail pills to Alabama residents, the dormant commerce clause might not get in the way of Alabama officials. It’s not possible,” said a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Mary Ziegler wrote in an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Friday:
Following the Supreme Court’s overturning ruling last June, state laws have been proposed and enacted in states that appear to be intended to influence abortion-related activities in other states. Law vs. Wade It gives each state broad powers to enact its own abortion laws. Some states are not content with regulating only what happens within their borders.
Idaho has passed a law making it illegal to advise anyone in the state on how to have an abortion in another state if that procedure would be illegal under Idaho’s strict abortion ban.
California passed a law to nullify other states’ subpoenas and legal demands in abortion-related investigations and established a fund to help people from other states travel to the Golden State for abortions.
The only Supreme Court member to directly address Thursday’s factory and farm ruling’s potential impact on the abortion struggle is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has allowed the pork producers’ lawsuits against California to continue. said he would.
Citing court briefs filed by 26 conservative-leaning states, Kavanaugh warned that “future state legislation of this kind may not be limited to the pork industry.” “If state law prohibits the ‘retail sale of goods from producers who do not pay for employee contraception or abortion’ (or sell goods from producers who pay for employee contraception or What will happen to retail sales?”
Kavanaugh, nominated by former President Donald Trump, said the country was sliding down a slippery slope that could effectively end the concept of a single market in the United States.
“California’s laws, therefore, allow each state to close its own market to goods produced in a manner contrary to its own moral or policy preferences, and in doing so effectively give other states access to those goods. “It is not the constitution that the enactors adopted in Philadelphia in 1787,” Mr. Kavanaugh said in his sole opinion. declared in
Lawyers specializing in abortion rights said they paid close attention to Mr. Kavanaugh’s statement on Thursday. Because when Kavanaugh joined four other conservative parties last year to abolish federal abortion rights, he said states should have, and will continue to have, the power to restrict or permit abortion. because he emphasized it. It is available because women are constitutionally guaranteed the right to travel.
Still, the ideologically dispersed distribution of judges in pork cases might advise against reading too much into abortion. Two liberal members of the court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, were also part of the ruling dismissing the pork producers’ lawsuits. Another liberal judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson, would have allowed the case to proceed.
It seems doubtful that Mr. Sotomayor and Mr. Cagan would have backed the states’ powers on the pork issue if they thought the judges were doing some damage to abortion rights.
“If the courts split along ideological lines and made it clear that the Dormant Commerce Clause would be repealed and states could do more, this would result in more effective or abortion coverage. I think it could be, but it really wasn’t,” Dean Rachel said. Lebouche at Temple Law School.
Some legal experts said the ruling likely made courts more likely to uphold certain abortion-related state laws, but only to a small extent.
“Courts that tended to uphold state laws banning the importation of abortion pills already had the tools to do so,” said Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf. “While this confirms those tools, I don’t think it enhances them that much.”
Cohen also warned that magistrates and judges may take a unilateral position on an issue in a particular case, but may take a different position in abortion litigation. “It’s always true that once you look for an abortion or mix it in, you ignore what judges have said in past litigation,” he says.
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