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Banned
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Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei
Sorry to break it to you Spektr, but the Bill of Rights, or the constitution as a whole, in no place mentions any fundamental right to privacy, or for that matter anything on abortion. You find those at the behest of creative judicial interpretation.
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Mojo_PeiPei, it may interest you to learn that the following is contained in the "Privacy Lesson" that the U.S. State Dept. displays on the web to inform folks from other countries about the matter of "a right to privacy". There are indications that the authors of the web page regard "a right to privacy", particularly related to a right to access to contraceptives and to abortion, without intrusion into these private matters, by the government, as "settled" law.....far from being a product of "creative judicial interpretation", they are the prevailing view of justices of competing politcal affiliation, for more than 115 years, and thus, are no more deserving of your "creative" label, than any other rulings of the SCOTUS, including "Brown v. Board of Ed."
Where else is their an example of such a long series of consistant and progressive SCOTUS rulings, as these rulings related to "privacy", that would qualify for the critical and marginalizing label of "creative judicial interpretation"? Can you provide any examples of a progression of SCOTUS rulings, on one area of the law, in an overlapping time period (late 19th century to early 21st century) that you would exclude from your "creative judicial interpretation"? Do you accept that the SCOTUS has any standing to interpret the constitution, that result in more legitimate interpretation, than it has in the privacy rulings?
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http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pub...of/privacy.htm
From — C H A P T E R 6 —
Privacy
....Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting in Olmstead v. United States (1928)
Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them on any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard. . . .
The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Brandeis considered it irrelevant that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment had not used the word "privacy" specifically, nor had they mentioned wire-tapping. How could they, since telephones had not been invented! What he and others have sought is not the literal meaning of the words, but what the Framers intended — namely, that government should leave people alone. The manner of intrusion did not matter; the fact of it did.
Eventually Brandeis's view prevailed, and, in the 1960s, the Court ruled that wire-tapping did violate a constitutionally protected right of privacy. As Justice Potter Stewart explained, the Fourth Amendment protects people not places. If people have legitimate expectations of privacy, such as in their home, then they may invoke the protection of the Constitution to ensure that privacy.
Nonetheless, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) the Court asked the question — Did the people want the state to be involved with intimate private decisions about family planning? The answer was clearly no, because this was a personal matter, a private decision, in which that the state had no business intruding. Justice Douglas, in striking down the state law and upholding the right of the clinic to dispense birth control information, declared that privacy, even though not mentioned directly, nonetheless enjoyed the constitutional protection that Justice Brandeis a generation earlier had proclaimed....
...Following the decision in Griswold that information about birth control, and the decision whether to use it, constituted a private matter, the Court in a case involving a woman's right to have an abortion, a few years later extended the right of privacy......
...Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992)
It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter. . . . At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State....
...Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in Washington v. Glucksberg (1997)
The Due Process Clause guarantees more than fair process, and the "liberty" it protects includes more than the absence of physical restraint. In a long line of cases, we have held that, in addition to the specific freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights, the "liberty" specially protected by the Due Process Clause includes the right to marry, to have children, to direct the education and upbringing of one's children, to marital privacy, to use contraception, to bodily integrity, and to abortion. We have also assumed, and strongly suggested, that the Due Process Clause protects the traditional right to refuse unwanted lifesaving medical treatment.....
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Last edited by host; 03-23-2006 at 02:04 AM..
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