A Supreme Successor to Justice Scalia: Here's a Record of Neil Gorsuch's Notable Cases

On the Saturday afternoon last February when he received word of Justice Scalia’s death, Neil M. Gorsuch “immediately lost [his] breath” and “couldn’t see . . . for the tears.”

In his grief over the death of a justice he deeply admired and emulated, Judge Gorsuch could hardly have imagined the series of events that would lead to his being selected today to fill the Scalia vacancy. And while he has rightly recognized that no one could ever replace Justice Scalia, there are strong reasons to expect Justice Gorsuch to be an eminently worthy successor to the great justice.

Gorsuch is a brilliant jurist and dedicated originalist and textualist. He thinks through issues deeply. He writes with clarity, force, and verve. And his many talents promise to give him an outsized influence on future generations of lawyers.

Gorsuch’s judicial outlook is reflected in his beautiful speech (text and video) celebrating — and embracing — Justice Scalia’s traditional understanding of the judicial role and his originalist methodology:

Perhaps the great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators. To remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future. But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society. That judges should instead strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be—not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.

In that speech, Gorsuch acknowledges that Justice Scalia’s project had its critics, from the secular moralist Ronald Dworkin to the pragmatist Richard Posner. He explains why he rejects those critics and instead sides with Justice Scalia in believing that “an assiduous focus on text, structure, and history is essential to the proper exercise of the judicial function.” The Constitution itself carefully separates the legislative and judicial powers. Whereas the legislative power is the “power to prescribe new rules of general applicability for the future,” the judicial power is a “means for resolving disputes about what existing law is and how it applies to discrete cases and controversies.” This separation of powers is “among the most important liberty-protecting devices of the constitutional design.” Among other things, if judges were to act as legislators by imposing their preferences as constitutional dictates, “how hard it would be to revise this so-easily-made judicial legislation to account for changes in the world or to fix mistakes.” Indeed, the “very idea of self-government would seem to wither to the point of pointlessness.”

As Gorsuch put it (in Cordova v. City of Albuquerque), the Constitution “isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams . . . , but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning” (emphasis added). In his one foray as a National Review Online contributor, in 2005 (before he took the bench), Gorsuch lamented that “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.”

Gorsuch’s Judicial Record, in Brief

At 49 years of age, Gorsuch has already served for more than a decade on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which reviews decisions of the federal district courts in the states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. His judicial record (which I am detailing more extensively in a series of posts on NRO’s Bench Memos blog) is remarkably impressive.

On issues of religious liberty, Gorsuch has an especially strong record. In 2013, he determined that Hobby Lobby was entitled under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act to relief from the HHS Obamacare mandate that would have required it to provide its employees insurance coverage for abortifacient drugs and devices. (By a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby in 2014.) In 2015, he objected vigorously to a Tenth Circuit ruling that held that the massive fines that the Obama administration threatened to impose on the Little Sisters of the Poor for refusing to facilitate insurance coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients did not seriously implicate their religious liberty. (In 2016, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Tenth Circuit to enable the government to work out a more sensible approach.)

Gorsuch has also fought against a hyper-expansive reading of the establishment clause that would exclude religion from the public square. In 2009 (in Green v. Haskell County Board of Commissioners), he disputed a panel decision that ruled that a county’s Ten Commandments display was unconstitutional. He memorably complained that the panel’s hypothetical “reasonable observer” — whose imagined perceptions dictate what does and does not violate the establishment clause — was not “someone who got things right” but was instead “an admittedly unreasonable” observer who “just gets things wrong” “because, the panel tells us, our observer is from a small town, where such errors cannot be helped.” In another case (American Atheists, Inc. v. Davenport), he disagreed with a panel ruling that Utah violated the establishment clause when it allowed the private Utah Highway Patrol Association to memorialize troopers killed in the line of duty by erecting large white crosses on public property near the locations of their deaths. The Tenth Circuit’s “reasonable observer,” in his view, “continues to be biased, replete with foibles, and prone to mistake” (as well as “a bit of a hot-rodder”).

Gorsuch has earned special acclaim for his insights on administrative law and separation of powers. In an opinion last August (Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch), he argued that the Supreme Court’s precedents on deference to reasonable agency interpretations of law “permit executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.” He called for the Supreme Court to reconsider whether the so-called Chevron doctrine of deference is sound. In another recent opinion (United States v. Nichols), he said that Congress had gone too far in delegating power to an agency to decide what conduct is criminal: For Congress to “effectively pass off to the prosecutor the job of defining the very crime he is responsible for enforcing” is “by any plausible measure . . . a delegation run riot, a result inimical to the people’s liberty and our constitutional design.”

Gorsuch has had only one case involving the matter of abortion (Planned Parenthood of Utah v. Herbert). Last October, he dissented strenuously when the Tenth Circuit refused to reconsider a panel ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood’s Utah affiliate. The panel had granted Planned Parenthood a preliminary injunction against the Utah governor’s directive to state agencies to stop acting as intermediaries for federal funds flowing to Planned Parenthood. Gorsuch faulted the panel for failing to accord the appropriate degree of deference to the district court’s factual findings and for making its own bizarre inferences about the governor’s reasons for acting.

In a case involving a firearms conviction (United States v. Games-Perez), Gorsuch protested that “people sit in prison because our circuit’s case law allows the government to put them there without proving a statutorily specified element of the charged crime.” In support of his interpretation of the statute, Gorsuch invoked, quoting Justice Thomas, the “long tradition of widespread lawful gun ownership by private individuals in this country” and the Supreme Court’s recognition that the Second Amendment “protects an individual’s right to own firearms and may not be infringed lightly.”

On criminal law and procedure, Gorsuch has a strong and balanced record. He has protected the privacy rights of Americans while respecting the proper powers of the police. Reversing a lower court, he concluded that when law-enforcement officers open and examine private e-mails, they are engaging in a search governed by the Fourth Amendment. He has argued, in dissent, that a homeowner who posted No Trespassing signs all over her property didn’t consent to police entering her property and knocking on her front door. But he has also explained that the Fourth Amendment must be applied in a manner that “takes a realistic view of human capacities and limitations.”

Gorsuch has complained that the overcriminalization of “so many facets of daily life [means] that prosecutors can almost choose their targets with impunity.” He has insisted that laws and regulations provide clear notice of what is prohibited, and he has prevented police officers from being held personally liable for conduct that wasn’t clearly unlawful.

Rocky Mountain Roots

Neil Gorsuch combines an appealing Rocky Mountain profile with a stellar personal history. He has deep roots in his hometown of Denver and absorbed his work ethic from his family. One of his grandfathers worked his way through law school with a job as a streetcar conductor in Denver. The other grew up in an Irish tenement in Denver and, at the age of eight, began working to support his family as a porter at a train station. Both of his parents were lawyers in Denver. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was one of the first women to work as a prosecutor in Denver, was twice elected to the Colorado legislature, and was President Reagan’s first head of the EPA.

In his youth, Gorsuch worked a variety of everyday jobs: shoveling snow, moving furniture, working the front desk at a Howard Johnson’s hotel. He also developed a lifelong love of the outdoors.

Gorsuch has a distinguished academic pedigree, with an undergraduate degree from Columbia, a J.D. from Harvard law school (in the same 1991 class as Barack Obama), and a doctorate (as a Marshall Scholar) from Oxford. In his courageous book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, he propounds the principles that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

After law school, Gorsuch was hired as a law clerk by D.C. Circuit judge David Sentelle and then by Supreme Court justice, and Colorado legend, Byron R. White. Because Justice White retired shortly before Gorsuch’s clerkship began, Gorsuch, in addition to assisting White, doubled as a clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

After his clerkships, Gorsuch joined a D.C. law firm, where he quickly became a partner and litigated for a decade. In 2005, he left private practice to serve as deputy associate attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice.

With the support of both Colorado senators — including Democrat Ken Salazar — President Bush nominated Gorsuch to a Tenth Circuit judgeship in 2006. The American Bar Association judicial-selection panel unanimously gave Gorsuch its highest rating of well-qualified. The Senate confirmed him unanimously, by voice vote, barely two months after his nomination.

Judge Gorsuch’s path to confirmation — this time to become Justice Gorsuch and a fit successor to Justice Scalia — should again be smooth and swift.

— Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former law clerk to Justice Scalia. He is a regular contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos, where he will be blogging extensively about the Gorsuch nomination.

Many who oppose Gorsuch fall into that category of Progressives who subscribe to the "living constitution" school of thought--an idea Dr. Walter Berns addressed magnificently in his 1984 essay, reprinted below:

Perhaps that essay from the Bicentennial 1987 Volume, "Our Ageless Constitution," by Dr.Berns, may be helpful in evaluating the legitimacy of Progressivism, as it manifests itself today.

Dr. Berns quotes the Founders themselves.

Do We Have
A Living
Constitution?

"Until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon them collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives [the executive, judiciary, or legislature]; in a departure from it prior to such an act." - Alexander Hamilton

In the first of the eighty-five "Federalist Papers," Alexander Hamilton emphasized that:

"... it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection or choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

The Framers knew that the passage of time would surely disclose imperfections or inadequacies in the Constitution, but these were to be repaired or remedied by formal amendment, not by legislative action or judicial construction (or reconstruction). Hamilton (in The Federalist No. 78) was emphatic about this:

"Until the people have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon them collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption, or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their representatives in a departure from it prior to such an act."

The Congress, unlike the British Parliament, was not given final authority over the Constitution, which partly explains why the judicial authority was lodged in a separate and independent branch of government. In Britain the supreme judicial authority is exercised by a committee of the House of Lords, which is appropriate in a system of parliamentary supremacy, but, although it was suggested they do so, the Framers refused to follow the British example.

The American system is one of constitutional supremacy, which means that sovereignty resides in the people, not in the King-in-Parliament; and the idea that the Constitution may be changed by an act of the legislature--even an act subsequently authorized by the judiciary--is simply incompatible with the natural right of the people to determine how (and even whether) they shall be governed.

Unlike in Britain where, formally at least, the queen rules by the grace of God (Dei gratia regina), American government rests on the consent of the people; and, according to natural right, the consent must be given formally. In fact, it must be given in a written compact entered into by the people. Here is Madison on the compacts underlying American government:

"Altho' the old idea of a compact between the Govt. & the people be justly exploded, the idea of a compact among those who are parties to a Govt. is a fundamental principle of free Govt.
"The original compact is the one implied or presumed, but nowhere reduced to writing, by which a people agree to form one society. The next is a compact, here for the first time reduced to writing, by which the people in their social state agree to a Govt. over them." (In a letter to Nicholas P. Trist, February 15, 1830)

Neither civil society (or as Madison puts it, "the people in their social state') nor government exists by nature. By nature everyone is sovereign with respect to himself, free to do whatever in his judgment is necessary to preserve his own life - or, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, everyone is endowed by nature with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of a happiness that he defines for himself. Civil society is an artificial person (constituted by the first of the compacts), and it is civil society that institutes and empowers government. So it was that they became "the People of the United States" in 1776 and, in 1787-88, WE, THE PEOPLE ordained and established "this Constitution for the United States of America."

In this formal compact THE PEOPLE specified the terms and conditions under which "ourselves and posterity," would be governed: granting some powers and withholding others, and organizing the powers granted with a view to preventing their misuse by the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches alike. WE THE PEOPLE were authorized by natural right to do this, and were authorized to act on behalf of posterity only insofar as the rights of posterity to change those terms and conditions were respected. This was accomplished in Article V of the Constitution, the amending article, which prescribed the forms to be followed when exercising that power in the future.

What THE PEOPLE were not permitted to do in 1787-88 was to deprive - or pretend to deprive - posterity of their natural right to do in the future what the founding generation had done in 1776. Nor could they, by pretending to delegate it to Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court, deprive them of their sovereign power to change the Constitution. Instead, that power was recognized in the Constitution's provisions in Article V.

The Framers had designed a constitutional structure for a government which would be limited by that structure - by the distribution of power into distinct departments, a system of legislative balances and checks, an independent judiciary, a system of representation, and an enlargement of the orbit "within which such systems are to revolve" And to the judges they assigned the duty, as "faithful guardians of the Constitution," to preserve the integrity of the structure, for it is by the structure (more than by "parchment barriers") that the government is limited. It would he only a slight exaggeration to say that, in the judgment of the Founders, the Constitution would "live" as long as that structure was preserved.

The Enduring American Constitution

Now, almost 200 years later, one can read Hamilton's words in Federalist No. 1 and conclude that, under some conditions, some "societies of men" are capable of "establishing good government," but that most are not. This is not for lack of trying; on the contrary, constitutions are being written all the time - of some 164 countries in the world, all but a small handful (seven by the latest count) have written constitutions - but most of them are not long-lived.

In September 1983, the American Enterprise Institute sponsored an international conference on constitution writing at the Supreme Court of the United States; some twenty-odd countries were represented. With the exception of the Americans, the persons present had themselves played a role - in some cases a major role - in the writing of their countries' constitutions, most of them written since 1970. Only the constitution of the French Fifth Republic predated 1970; and the Nigerian, so ably discussed and defended at the 1983 conference by one of its own Framers, had subsequently been subverted, much as the four previous French republican constitutions had been subverted. It would seem that many peoples are experienced in the writing of constitutions, but only a few of them - conspicuous among these the people of America - have an experience of stable constitutional government. In that sense, we surely have "a living Constitution." That is not, however, the sense in which the term is ordinarily used in the literature of constitutional law as shall be explored herein.

Treating The Constitution As
A Thing Without Form or Substance:
New Definitions Of 'Living'

In the language of many today, a "living Constitution" is not first of all one that is long-lived; rather, its longevity is a secondary or derivative quality which is attributed to its "flexibility" or better, its "adaptability." It is this quality--"adaptability"-- that allows it to be "kept in tune with the times," as the members of this school of thought sometimes say. According to them, a living Constitution is first of all a protean constitution - one whose meaning is not fixed, but variable.

In this respect, it is similar to the Constitution as understood by the "judicial power" school. Some judicial power advocates go so far as to say that, until the judges supply it in the process of adjudication, the Constitution has no meaning whatever. Here are the words of judge Lynn D. Compton of California, writing in 1977 in the pages of the Los Angeles Times:

"Let's be honest with the public. Those courts are policy-making bodies. The policies they set have the effect of law because of the power those courts are given by the Constitution. The so-called "landmark decisions" of both of U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court were not compelled by legal precedent. Those decisions are the law and are considered "right" simply because the court had the power to decree the result. The result in any of those cases could have been exactly the opposite and by the same criteria been correct and binding precedent.
"In short, these precedent-setting policy decisions were the products of the social, economic and political philosophy of the majority of the justices who made up the court at a given time in history .."

So extreme a view of judicial power is not likely ever to be expressed in the official reports; there (perhaps in order to be dishonest with the public) even the most inventive judge will claim to be expounding the Constitution, if not its explicit provisions then, at least its emanations, penumbras, or lacunae (Griswold v. Connecticut). What is of interest is that a judge should be willing to express it anywhere - for what it means is that a constitutional provision can be interpreted, but not misinterpreted, construed but not misconstrued. More to the point here is that it means that the Constitution is a living charter of government only because it is repeatedly being reinvented by the judiciary.

"Creating" Constitutional Rights and Dworkin's Influence

The 'Living Constitution' school and the 'Judicial Power' school may be indistinguishable at the margins, but they derive from unrelated and distinct sources. 'Judicial Power' is a product or an extension of legal realism, the school of thought whose advocates, from the beginning of the twentieth century, have argued that the essence of the judicial process consists not in interpreting law, whether statute or constitutional, but in making it. Its advocates today speak with a certain nonchalance of "creating" constitutional rights (Moore v. City of East Cleveland), and, when pressed to cite their authority for doing so are likely to point to the work of contemporary legal theorists like Ronald Dworkin and his book Taking Rights Seriously . It is Dworkin who has purportedly given this sort of "constitutional lawmaking" what it has always lacked a philosophical underpinning. As he sees it, rights cannot be taken seriously until there has been "a fusion of constitutional law and moral theory," and to make it clear that he is not referring to any particular moral theory that may have informed the Constitution as written, he finishes that sentence by saying that that fusion "has yet to take place."
As it turns out, however, the moral theory he propounds, and which he hopes to "fuse" with constitutional law, proves to be nothing more than a fancy way of justifying what the judge Comptons among us have been doing all along. And what they have been doing is, essentially, treating the Constitution as a thing without form or substance, except insofar as it authorizes the judges to give it substance.

The 'Living Constitution' School's Distortion of Marshall

The living Constitution school also claims to have a source more venerable than legal realism or Ronald Dworkin - justice John Marshall. A former president of the American Political Science Association argues that the idea of a " 'living Constitution'...can trace its lineage back to John Marshall's celebrated advice in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819): 'We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding...intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs' " The words quoted are certainly Marshall's but the opinion attributed to him is at odds with his well-known statements that, for example, the "principles" of the Constitution "are deemed fundamental [and] permanent" and, except by means of formal amendment, "unchangeable" (Marbury v. Madison). It is important to note that the discrepancy is not Marshall's; it is largely the consequence of the manner in which he is quoted - ellipses are used to join two statements separated by some eight pages in the original text. Marshall did not say that the Constitution should be adapted to the various crises of human affairs; he said that the powers of Congress are adaptable to meet those crises. The first statement appears in that part of his opinion where he is arguing that the Constitution cannot specify "all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit;" if it attempted to do so, it would "partake of the prolixity of a legal code" (McCulloch v. Maryland), In the second statement, Marshall's subject is the legislative power, and specifically the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the explicitly granted powers.
Neither Marshall nor any other prominent members of the founding generation can be 'appropriated' by the living Constitution school to support their erroneous views. Marshall's and the Founders' concern was not to keep the Constitution in tune with the times but, rather, to keep the times to the extent possible, in tune with the Constitution. And that is why the Framers assigned to the judiciary the task of protecting the Constitution as written.
They were under no illusions that this would prove to be an easy task. Nevertheless, they had reason to believe that they had written a constitution that deserved to endure and, properly guarded, would endure. Hence, Madison spoke out forcefully against frequent appeals to the people for change. Marshall had this Madisonian passage in mind when, in his opinion for the Court in Marbury, he wrote:

"That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected. The exercise of this original right is a very great exertion; nor can it, nor ought it, to be frequently repeated. The principles, therefore, so established, are deemed fundamental: and as the authority from which they proceed is supreme, and can seldom act, they are designed to be permanent."

At this point, it is well to remember Hamilton's strong warning about unwarranted presumptions by those in government of a power to depart from the people's established form as quoted in the title of this essay.

Marshall referred to the "principles" which he called "permanent," and the "basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected" Yet Marshall also chose to address the much broader issue of the general scope of the national powers. The Constitution must be construed to "...allow to the national legislature that discretion, with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be carried into execution, which will enable that body to perform the high duties assigned to it, in the manner most beneficial to the people." It is these powers, not the Constitution, which are flexible and adaptable to meet the crises of "human affairs."

Ironically, the very case cited by the "living Constitution" school, when properly read, demonstrates that John Marshall, at least, saw, no need for flexibility in the Constitution.

Summary: Do We Have A Living Constitution?

What has been undertaken here has been providing (within a very brief compass indeed) an accurate statement of the principles underlying the American Constitution: pointing to (but by no means elaborating) the political theory from which they derive and the constitutional conclusions to which they lead. Among the latter is the untenability of the proposition that constitutional limitations can be jettisoned, constitutional power enhanced, or the constitutional division of powers altered, by means other than formal constitutional amendment.

It will not be argued that it may sometimes be convenient to allow the Senate to originate a bill "for raising revenue," but convenience is not a measure of constitutionality. There is much to be said in favor of the legislative veto - Who would, in principle, deny the need of checks on administrative agencies? - but, as the Supreme Court correctly said, the Framers anticipated that Congress might find reason to employ such devices and, when designing the so-called "presentment clause" in Article 1, Section 7, forbade them ( Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha). And from a particular partisan perspective it is understandably frustrating, simply because the required number of states had not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, to be denied the power to promote the cause of sexual equality; but frustration alone cannot justify a judicial attempt to preclude the necessity of formal ratification, as Justice Brennan is said to have wished to do. In Frontiero v. Richardson (411 U.S. 677, 1973) the Supreme Court was divided on the issue of whether sex, like race, should be treated as a suspect classification. We are told that Justice Brennan circulated a draft opinion in which he proposed to declare classification by sex virtually impermissible and that he knew this would have the effect of "enacting" the pending ERA. "But Brennan was accustomed to having the Court out in front, leading any civil rights movement," a major publication stated. Hence, we are further told, he saw "no reason to wait several years for the states to ratify the amendment." No reason, that is, other than the fact, which Brennan implicitly acknowledged, that the Constitution as then written, and which had not yet been rewritten by the only people authorized to rewrite it, did not support the role he would have the Court hand down.

Those who would use "convenience" or "frustration" as reason, or who insist that it lies within the powers of the Court (or the Congress or the Executive) to effect constitutional change, can be charged with a lack of respect for the principles on which, as Marshall wisely observed: "the whole American fabric has been erected."

We are told that it is unreasonable - even foolish - to expect that the Framers could have written a Constitution suitable alike for a society of husbandman and a society of multinational corporations, to say nothing of one as well adapted to the age of the musket and sailing ship as to the age of intercontinental nuclear-tipped missiles. As the problems have changed, the argument goes, so must the manner in which they are confronted and solved, and the Constitution cannot be allowed to stand in the way. Indeed, there is no reason to allow it to stand in the way, we are told, because the Framers intended it to be flexible. And we are told that John Marshall would support this position. But it was Marshall, in McCulloch v. Maryland, who stated: "Throughout this vast republic, from the St. Croix to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, revenue is to be collected and expended, armies are to be marched and supported." The United States, in this view was not intended to be a simple society of husbandmen, and Marshall Clearly saw that the Constitution empowered Congress to do what was required to meet the crises of the Republic, and to maintain the Constitutional structure intended by the Framers, changing it only when such change would be in keeping with the structure itself.

That the American Constitution is long-lived, has enduring qualities, and was intended for the ages cannot be doubted. That it was founded on enduring principles, and that it was based on the authority of a people who are sovereign has been attested to by many of its leaders. That it can be changed when, and if, the people ordain such change is a part of its own provisions. For these reasons, it can be said to be a "Living Constitution" - but let that not be claimed by those who would use the language to subvert the structure.

Our Ageless Constitution - Part VII (1987) (Publisher: W. David Stedman Associates; W. D. Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Eds.) ISBN 0-937047-01-5 (Essay adapted by Editors for publication in this Volume in consultation with Dr. Walter Berns from Berns' article by the same title in National Forum, The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Fall 1984)

The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, Neil M. Gorsuch

After assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia, Gorsuch builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization, one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate—the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong. At the same time, the argument Gorsuch develops leaves wide latitude for individual patient autonomy and the refusal of unwanted medical treatment and life-sustaining care, permitting intervention only in cases where an intention to kill is present.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8317.html

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments xi

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: The Glucksberg and Quill Controversies: The Judiciary’s (Non)Resolution of the Assisted Suicide Debate 8
2.1 The Washington Due Process Litigation 8
2.2 The New York Equal Protection Litigation 11
2.3 The Final Battle? The Supreme Court Does (and Does Not) Decide 14
2.4 The Aftermath of Glucksberg and Quill 17

Chapter 3: The Debate over History 19
3.1 Which History? 20
3.2 The Project 22
3.3 The Ancients 22
3.4 Early Christian History 25
3.5 English Common Law 28
3.6 Colonial American Experience 29
3.7 The Modern Consensus on Suicide and Its Assistance 30
3.8 The Euthanasia Movement 33
3.9 Prevailing Law Today 43
3.10 Conclusion 46

Chapter 4: Arguments from Fairness and Equal Protection: If a Right to Refuse, Then a Right to Assisted Suicide? 48
4.1 An Act /Omission Distinction? 49
4.2 A Causation-Based Distinction? 51
4.3 Toward an Intent-Based Distinction: The Insight of the Double Effect Principle 53
4.4 Some (Initial) Arguments against Double Effect: Conflating Intent and Foresight 57
4.5 Distinguishing Suicide, Assisted Suicide, and Euthanasia from the Right to Refuse: Intending versus Foreseeing Death 62
4.6 Some (Additional) Criticisms of Double Effect as Applied to the Assisted Suicide Debate 69
4.7 Conclusion 75

Chapter 5: Casey and Cruzan: Do They Intimate a Right to Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia? 76
5.1 The “Reasoned Judgment” Test and Its Critics 76
5.2 Casey-Based Arguments 79
5.3 Cruzan-Based Arguments 82
5.4 Conclusion 84

Chapter 6: Autonomy Theory’s Implications for the Debate over Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia 86
6.1 The Autonomy Debate 86
6.2 The Neutralist View of Autonomy 87
6.3 The Harm Principle’s Competing View 89
6.4 Perfectionism and Autonomy 90
6.5 The Implications of Autonomy Theory for the Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Debate 93

Chapter 7: Legalization and the Law of Unintended Consequences: Utilitarian Arguments for Legalization 102
7.1 The Dutch Experience: “Virtually Abuse-Free”? 103
7.2 The Oregon Experience: An “All-Too Conscientious” Statutory Regime? 115
7.3 Legalization and Other Unintended Consequences 125
7.4 Decriminalization as a “Costless” Enterprise? 132
7.5 How to “Balance” the Costs and Benefits of Legalization? 138
7.6 Conclusion 141

Chapter 8: Two Test Cases: Posner and Epstein 143
8.1 Posner’s Utilitarian Case for Assisted Suicide 143
8.2 Posner’s and Epstein’s Libertarian Case for Assisted Suicide 152

Chapter 9: An Argument against Legalization 157
9.1 The Inviolability of Human Life 157
9.2 What Does It Mean to Respect Human Life as a Basic Good? 163
9.3 Some Objections 167
9.4 The Future of the Oregon Experiment? 176

Chapter 10: Toward a Consistent End-of-Life Ethic: The “Right to Refuse” Care for Competent and Incompetent Patients 181
10.1 The Inviolability of Life and the “Right to Refuse” for Competent Persons 182
10.2 The “Right to Refuse” and Infant Patients 191
10.3 The “Right to Refuse” and Incompetent Adult Patients 204
10.4 Conclusions 215

Epilogue 219
Appendix A: Certain American Statutory Laws Banning or Disapproving of Assisted Suicide 227
Appendix B: Statistical Calculations 229

Notes 231
Bibliography 285
Index 303

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The Enduring American Constitution

Treating The Constitution As
A Thing Without Form or Substance:
New Definitions Of 'Living'

"Creating" Constitutional Rights and Dworkin's Influence

The 'Living Constitution' School's Distortion of Marshall

Summary: Do We Have A Living Constitution?

The Enduring American Constitution

Treating The Constitution As A Thing Without Form or Substance: New Definitions Of 'Living'

"Creating" Constitutional Rights and Dworkin's Influence

The 'Living Constitution' School's Distortion of Marshall

Summary: Do We Have A Living Constitution?

Treating The Constitution As
A Thing Without Form or Substance:
New Definitions Of 'Living'