Why isn&#39;t a draft (conscription) slavery? The 13th Amendment bans all slavery except for &quot;a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.&quot; It doesn't appear to contain any language about military service or national security. A draft is involuntary work that there is no way to opt out of. They can send you anywhere in the world and force you to perform any tasks they want, even some tasks that would be illegal for civilians (like killing people). If you refuse, you go to jail. Why isn't this considered slavery?
The only real answer is that the US Supreme Court, in interpreting the constitution, and specifically the argument that the 13th Amendment prohibits a draft for compelled military services has totally rejected that argument. For many years now the US has not used a draft, and it is obviously possible for the US to have an enduring and powerful military without any draft, which was perhaps not apparent to the Justices in 1918. A draft had been common in this country from the colonial period, through the Revolution, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In reaction to the problems during the Vietnam War, and the great opposition to any draft at that time, the US has not used a draft since, although it retains a legal requirement to register for a possible draft, and the legal authority to impose one should it be thought wise. Note that this was not because of the 13th Amendment. Note also that compelled service by the citizens (or residents) in a locality, particularly to fight fires and floods, when the usual forces are inadequate to that end, has been commonly used. Such compulsory service has never been thought to be prohibited by the 13th Amendment. Also, as mentioned in comments, citizens can be compelled to do jury duty, which could in theory be considered &quot;involuntary servitude&quot; but has never been thought to be prohibited by the 13th amendment. The answer by Trish (now deleted) thoroughly described the many differences between a slave and a drafted soldier. Still, drafted military service might be thought to be a form of involuntary servitude. But the Court (and the laws and other courts as well) have not treated it as such. In the Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 U.S. 366 (1918) the Court thought the idea that compulsory military service constituted involuntary servitude was so wrongheaded that it thought a very brief mention sufficient to refute this contention. It wrote (at 245 U. S. 390): Finally, as we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement. It is clear from the text of that opinion that the justices thought that the existence of a power to draft soldiers was essential to the implementation of the constitutional power (article I section 8): To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; The opinion discusses the history of compelled military service in the United States, in the colonies before there was a United States, and in Great Britain before that. The opinion says that: Compelled military service is neither repugnant to a free government nor in conflict with the constitutional guaranties of individual liberty. Indeed, it may not be doubted that the very conception of a just government and its duty to the citizen includes the duty of the citizen to render military service in case of need, and the right of the government to compel it. and Further, it is said, the right to provide is not denied by calling for volunteer enlistments, but it does not and cannot include the power to exact enforced military duty by the citizen. This however but challenges the existence of all power, for a governmental power which has no sanction to it and which therefore can only be exercised provided the citizen consents to its exertion is in no substantial sense a power. One may disagree, but that is the law of the land as interpreted by the final body authorized to make such interpretations, the Supreme Court, and it remains good law today.
To pick up on your comment 'Does this mean if I wish to build a chair for personal use, then since trade of chairs exists between states, Congress has the authority to outlaw possession or manufacturing of chairs?': Yes. For example, the US Congress can legislate to prohibit a farmer from growing wheat for use on his own farm, on the basis that there is interstate trade in wheat and therefore the Commerce Clause permits Congress to regulate the growing of wheat: Wickard v Filburn (1942) 317 US 111. If you grow marijuana, or build a chair, or whatever, you conceivably affect the number of marijuanas, chairs, etc that are traded between states. Therefore you affect interstate commerce. Therefore the US Congress can regulate you. The fact that your marijuana or your chair or your what is trivial in the scheme of the national economy is irrelevant if the aggregation of all regulated marijuana, chairs or wheat is significant: 317 US 111, 127-128. If the law didn't prohibit possession of marijuana absolutely but instead prohibited, say, the carrying of marijuana in schools, then the US Congress might have trouble relying on the Commerce Clause: see United States v Lopez (1995) 514 US 549 and replace 'marijuana' with 'handguns' (OK the marijuana/handgun analogy is bad but hopefully this illustrates that there are at least some limits on Congress' power -- it's not just 'any physical object that relates whatsoever to interstate trade therefore unfettered federal legislative power').
Since you asked two questions: No and No Does a company’s T&amp;C or their house rules supersede law No and is asking private health status (including the request to wear a mask) an offence? No A company cannot require you to do things that are against the law but they can require you to do things that go further than the legal minimum. The UK and Spanish governments do not require you to wear a mask but they do not prohibit private organisations (like airlines) for making it a requirement to access their facilities. The law requires that they make reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. But you don’t have a disability, you just can’t sleep with a mask on. If you had a disability you would have no trouble in getting a letter from your doctor to that effect. The contract requires them to take you from the UK to Spain: they don’t have to enable you to sleep. If you read the T&amp;C, you will find that they can refuse to carry you if, in their reasonable opinion, you pose a hazard to the aircraft or the people aboard it.
In the United States, I would strongly expect that an accurate depiction of historical fact (even if uncomfortably graphic) would be protected under the First Ammendment. Otherwise, the government could functionally censor the worst parts of history (as being too awful to discuss or depict), which is exactly the kind of thing the First Amendment is designed to prevent. There are three important categories of speech that are not protected: (1) "fighting words" directed at a person intended to provoke a fight, (2) words that infict emotional distress such that it qualifies as a tort, and (3) speech that court finds to qualify as "obscenity". Of these three, your game probably will not qualify for the first, since it generally requires speech directed at a specific person or people. I also suspect (less confidently) that an emotional-distress tort would not succeed since your game is not directed at any particular living people. Even if the game caused emotional distress to someone, your public release of the game probably could not qualify as a tort against that specific player who happens to experience emotional distress. The Miller test is used to determine if a work is obscenity. Wikipeida summarizes its three parts, all of which must be satisfied to constitute obscenity: Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law, Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The first two are explicitly sexual in nature. I don't know if there is any similar prohibition against hyper-violence, but even if there were, as long as your game does not run afoul of the "lacks serious artistic value" condition, you will be on the safe side of the line. Note that none of this stops anyone from initiating legal action against you (which may cause headaches for you); it only stops those legal actions from succeededing.
Probably not. There is an unenumerated constitutional &quot;right to travel&quot; (which has been recognized in case law, and has not yet been judicially overruled) and there is also a concept called the &quot;dormant commerce clause&quot; which prohibits legislation by a state that interferes with the ability of people to engage in interstate commerce even if Congress has passed no relevant legislation. There could also be a privileges and immunities clause argument arising under the original 1789 constitution and not the 14th Amendment to that document privileges and immunities clause, which affords people from outside a state the same rights as people in a state. Also, citizens of a state are defined as its residents, so a state only has jurisdiction over someone as a citizen for so long as they reside there. I was born in Georgia, for example, but haven't lived there since I was six years old, so I am not a citizen of Georgia. The proposed Texas law bears some similarity to the Mann Act of 1910 which prohibits transporting people across state lines for the purposes of prostitution (to slightly oversimplify). But the Mann Act is a federal law, not a state law. The proposed Texas law also bears some similarity to the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which required free states to respect the slave status of people treated as slaves in a slave state under the slave state's law by returning fugitive slaves to their out of state masters, when the slave escaped across state lines. But, this was also a federal law and reflect the greater extraterritorial force of contracts and property rights created under state law compared to the extraterritorial force of the police powers of a state government. There are constitutional provisions requiring states to honor each other's rulings as well, most notably the requirement to extradite felons, and the full faith and credit clause that requires states to honor the court judgments and government determinations of status (e.g. marriage certificates) of other states in most circumstances. But, I don't think that you get there in a case regulating the conduct of a state resident outside the state, or in a case where you want to criminalize assisting someone in the state to leave the state for a particular purpose. Neither of these examples, however, involve state laws. Generally, penalties for doing something across state lines need to be established by federal, rather than state, laws. This said, the issue has not been litigated in this particular context yet, and the legal theories implicated and structure of those lines in fine particulars could matter. States have only rarely tried to regulate the conduct of their residents outside their own states and have even less frequently been successful in doing so.
There is, in most countries at least, no law requiring a business to treat a customer fairly. In general, a business may refuse to serve a would-be customer for any reason or none, provided that the reason is not membership in a protected class (racial, religious, ethnic, or sexual bias, mostly). Exactly which classes are protected depends on the local law (in the US, there can be such laws at all of federal, state, and municipal levels). If a customer is asked to leave and does not do so, s/he could be charged with defiant trespass (or local equivalent). More likely, security, or the police, could simply escort the customer out of the business, using as much force as is reasonably needed for that purpose. Unless there are grounds for action not mentioned, I see no basis for a successful suit by the customer.
First, this issue doesn't come up for people on active duty. 10 U.S. Code &sect; 973 forbids active-duty military officers from holding or exercising the functions of an elective federal office; DoDD 1344.10 extends that to all active-duty personnel. Both the law and the directive also apply to reservists or retirees on long-term active duty (more than 270 days). Second, for status reasons, this is much less likely to come up with enlisted personnel. The sort of people who serve in Congress are generally also the sort of people who'd be officers. Many of the relevant restrictions apply to people holding office in the executive branch, and enlisted personnel do not hold office (only commissioned and warrant officers do). Third, an interesting quirk that makes this even more significant: Retired military personnel do not technically leave the military. They're no longer in active service, but they are still military personnel, bound by the UCMJ, and subject to both voluntary and involuntary recall. In fact, people retired from active-duty components are bound by the UCMJ at all times, whereas non-retired reservists are only bound by it when called up. If this is an issue for reservists because they might be called up, it's also an issue for retirees. Now that we've handled preliminaries, the central issue comes from the Incompatibility Clause in Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution: [N]o person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House [of Congress] during his continuance in office. The question is whether reservists count as holding an "office under the United States." If it does, you have to resign from the reserves before entering Congress. However, Congress decides whether or not someone is qualified to be a member, and Congress has generally refused to explicitly decide if reservists are allowed (implicitly meaning that yes, they are). 6 Cannon's Precedents &sect;&sect; 60--62 covers the situation as of World War I: the House Judiciary Committee recommended that members of Congress who had accepted National Guard commissions be considered to have forfeit their seats in Congress, but the full House didn't act on the recommendation. After the war, the House decided to pay members who had been on military service the difference between their congressional pay and military pay. In the second debate, the House considered the difference between temporary and permanent office. It was pointed out that in past wars, members had served as officers in short-term volunteer units and then returned to their seats at the end of their service. It was also pointed out that an "office" is an inherently permanent thing: a temporary commission for the duration of a war might not necessarily be an office. 2 Deschler's Precedents &sect; 14 discusses how things played out in World War II and beyond. Here, the US involvement was much longer, and there was more consideration given to the problems with holding both offices. The executive branch was the one that complained; they decided that serving in Congress was more important than serving overseas, and that military personnel who were also in Congress would be told to pick one (either go back to Congress and serve there, or resign from Congress and be in the military). In 1965, the Defense Department issued an order (currently found in DoDD 1200.7) which provides for the involuntary transfer of people in key positions (including all members of Congress) from the Ready Reserve to the Standby Reserve. Congress did not like that, and they (finally) struck back in the 2016 NDAA: they amended 10 U.S. Code &sect; 10149 to ban transfers to the Standby Reserve based on service in Congress. This certainly seems to promote the idea that Congress thinks reserve service is allowable, but when Barry Goldwater tried to get a resolution to that effect in 1963, Congress didn't act on it. So in summary: Congress (which enforces the Incompatibility Clause) hasn't explicitly said simultaneous reserve service is allowable, but has essentially let it happen. The executive branch has tried to discourage it, but Congress has opposed that (personally, my guess is that members of Congress want the political benefit of saying "I'm currently in the military," while the military would prefer not to have them). I've discussed how Congress handles it, and Congress does have the final authority to judge the qualifications of its members. There was one Supreme Court case (cited in Deschler's Precedents) where a group tried to get the two positions ruled incompatible, but it was dismissed on standing grounds (the group could not establish that they were particularly harmed by the alleged violation). A lower court had held that the offices were incompatible, but that ruling was vacated by the Supreme Court. However, there was another opinion issued in 2006 where the courts couldn't duck the question. Sen. Lindsey Graham was also an Air Force lawyer (he's since retired), and while a Senator he was tapped to be a military judge on the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals. An airman was convicted at court martial and appealed to a panel that included Graham, then appealed again to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. There's no question that a criminal defendant has standing to challenge whether his judge can legally be a judge, and Congress does not have the final say over whether someone's qualified to be a military judge. In US v. Lane, the CAAF held that Graham's office in the Senate was incompatible with service as a military judge. However, the CAAF cannot tell Congress "you can't be an active reservist and a sitting member of Congress." Even the Supreme Court is limited in its ability to interfere with Congress's decisions on the qualifications of its members: the Court did hold that Congress can't add qualifications, but this is a question of "does this provision apply to this person," which Congress has final authority over.
The problem is that the Constitution does not provide a freestanding right to &quot;self-determination,&quot; to self-defense, or to bodily integrity. To the extent the courts recognize any of these as implied rights, they are subject to balancing against other rights or governmental authority. Analogizing to the Second Amendment can be helpful. There's a lot of gray area in Second Amendment law, but it's pretty clear that I have a right to keep a knife on my bedstand, but not to build a nuclear arsenal in your backyard. Why not? Because you have a right to keep people off your property, and because the government has an interest in protecting its citizens, infrastructure, and natural resources from the risks associated with my incompetent exercise of my Second Amendment rights. So what interests are at stake in the abortion question? Roe held that women have a right to privacy that protects access to abortion, but it also recognized that the government has an interest in protecting potential life. The question was how to balance the privacy interest against the interest in protecting potential life. Roe said the woman's rights generally outweigh the government's interests up until the point of viability, at which point the government's interests begin to outweigh the woman's privacy interests. But Dobbs appears poised to change that by saying that the woman's right to privacy does not exist at all. Dobbs likewise rejects the idea that the right to due process or any other constitutional right protects the right to abortion. Therefore, it concludes, a woman has no rights that can outweigh the state's interest in protecting the potential life she is carrying. Dobbs also recognizes -- but does not take a position on -- the argument that a fetus is actually a person itself. If a legislature were to adopt that position, and the courts were to accept it, we would find ourselves in a position where whatever rights a woman has to self-determination and bodily integrity would have to be balanced against the fetus's rights to self-determination and bodily integrity.