Essays on Majority Opinion

Facts and History of the Case

In order to understand the point of reviewing the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, on has to be aware of the facts about the case first. The Obergefell v. Hodges case was a landmark case that was handled by no less than the United States Supreme Court . The main issue at hand was the constitutionality of the previously implemented clauses banning same sex marriages. There were two issues at hand here. The first one was the legalization of same-sex marriage. The second issue was whether the prior and the still existing bans on same-sex marriage were constitutional or otherwise. ...

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

In 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Under the ACA, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is authorized to promulgate regulations on the kinds of contraceptives and family planning services that should be covered under certain employer-based health plans. Previously, HHS exempted a broad class of religious institutions (e.g. churches, religious orders, and their integrated auxiliaries) and not-for-profit organizations. Eventually, HHS concluded that any contraceptive approved by the FDA should be covered. Under the contraceptive mandate, any company not in compliance is subject to a penalty of $100 per ...

Abstract

This paper examines the case of Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that combined the substantive, environmental law question of whether the Environmental Protection Agency erred in its initial decision not to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for motor vehicles with the procedural issue of whether states, cities, and environmental organizations had legal standing (defined as the right to use the courts as opposed to Congress to force governmental action) for the environmental claims at issue in the case. This paper begins with a brief overview of the political, legal, and cultural context for assessing the ...

Alignment of the single-sex admission policy of Virginia Military Institution (VMI) aligns with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was the issue raised in United States v. Virginia. VMI has been an all-male institution since its inception in 1839. In deciding that the single-sex admission policy of VMI violated the equal protection clause, the majority opinion relied on ‘intermediate scrutiny’ test applied in the prior case of Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan. In the Hogan case, the Court employed the ‘intermediate scrutiny’ test, but applied this in terms of the ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ standard. The standard ...

Abstract

This paper puts the legal and ethical issues of physician-assisted suicide in the context of the larger debate on privacy and the right to die, which can be divided into three constituent parts: (1) a patient’s constitutionally protected right to privacy in all matters involving end-of-life treatment decisions. So long as a patient has the mental capacity to make informed consent, the government does not have a legitimate interest to override end-of-life decisions. Critical to the analysis of a patient’s refusal of life-sustaining treatment is the burden of the state to prove a patient did not have ...