E-mail:
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Bruce Ackerman bruce.ackerman at yale.edu
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Mary Dudziak mary.l.dudziak at emory.edu
Joey Fishkin joey.fishkin at gmail.com
Heather Gerken heather.gerken at yale.edu
Abbe Gluck abbe.gluck at yale.edu
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Andrew Koppelman akoppelman at law.northwestern.edu
Marty Lederman msl46 at law.georgetown.edu
Sanford Levinson slevinson at law.utexas.edu
David Luban david.luban at gmail.com
Gerard Magliocca gmaglioc at iupui.edu
Jason Mazzone mazzonej at illinois.edu
Linda McClain lmcclain at bu.edu
John Mikhail mikhail at law.georgetown.edu
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Deborah Pearlstein dpearlst at yu.edu
Rick Pildes rick.pildes at nyu.edu
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Alice Ristroph alice.ristroph at shu.edu
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David Super david.super at law.georgetown.edu
Brian Tamanaha btamanaha at wulaw.wustl.edu
Nelson Tebbe nelson.tebbe at brooklaw.edu
Mark Tushnet mtushnet at law.harvard.edu
Adam Winkler winkler at ucla.edu
Back in April, Steve Lubet and I suggested
that the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius could seriously hamstring
the efforts of the federal government to control Covid-19. At the time, the question was almost purely
theoretical, given President Trump’s lack of interest in controlling the
disease. It is now urgently relevant,
because increasing numbers of Americans understand that Mr. Trump’s desire for
a second term is a mortal danger to themselves and their families, and Joe
Biden is likely to replace him. And
Biden is contemplating aggressive measures to control the virus, such as a
nationwide mask mandate.
So, predictably, conservative legal academics Josh
Blackman, James
Phillips, and John Yoo have responded by asserting that neither the
President nor Congress have the power to take such measures.And they are making exactly the arguments
that Lubet and I anticipated.
If they are right, then if some states allow themselves
to become petri dishes of disease, their residents will be free to bring the
disease to other states, neither those states nor the federal government will
be able to control its spread.
The trouble with these arguments is that they turn on the
limitations on the commerce power that the Court invented in NFIB v. Sebelius,
and those limitations have no basis in the Constitution, as I have arguedextensively.
You might think that this argument comes at an
inopportune time.What sane person
insists on inventing new limitations on government power, limitations that constrain its capacity to deal with a pandemic, when a thousand people
are dying every day?But that line was
already crossed in the Obamacare case.This is just more of the same.