Can someone summarize the ruling in Texas Mifepristone ruling? I started reading the ruling in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, but it's 60 pages long and full of the expected legalese. Can someone summarize the argument of the plaintiffs and the legal basis of the judge's ruling in plain language? How can a judge with no medical background invalidate the FDA's approval of a drug?
Some interesting reasoning about standing aside (which antivaxxers etc. will love though, because it stipulates that the FDA refusing to collect all side effects statistics [even starting 16 years later] gives standing to sue on the original approval), the Texas' judge estimation of success on the merits is essentially relying on the finding that &quot;Pregnancy is not an illness&quot; (p. 40) and essentially repeated on p. 44 as &quot;Chemical Abortion Drugs do not provide a Meaningful Therapeutic Benefit&quot;, so that in the Judge's estimation drugs for terminating pregnancy can be held to a [much] higher safety standard than the FDA decided by itself. This ultimately phrased as (p. 57): The Court does not second-guess FDA's decision-making lightly. But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns in violation of its statutory duty based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions. It's followed by another finding that there was likely political interference by the Clinton administration with the FDA's decision. This a rather partial summary since the order involves several FDA decisions, the details of which which I'm glossing over here (like the fact that the decision to not collect all side effects stats for mifepristone is rather more recent, being taken in 2016--but nonetheless the judge found that consequently the original 2000 decision was reopened as well, and can the object of the suit too.)
I think that is not a &quot;reasonable&quot; interpretation of the order, but that's separate from the question of what will be enforced. Focusing on the word of the order, No entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including an employee or a consumer What does it mean to &quot;compel&quot; a person to do something? A court can compel a person to stay in jail for some period of time, and can order the police to use force to enforce that requirement – that's the classical example of compulsion. Nobody except the police can compel a consumer to do anything. All of the words of the order have to be given meaning, and it is not reasonable to say that &quot;compel&quot; is limited to &quot;actions backed up by police action&quot;. The government does not separately compel &quot;consumers&quot; and &quot;employees&quot; to do things. In order to sensibly interpret &quot;compel&quot; and &quot;consumer&quot;, this has to interpreted as including things other than &quot;pointing a gun at a person&quot;. The only sensible interpretation is one that includes denying service to those who do not comply. In addition, the series of &quot;Whereas's&quot; clearly indicate a ban on &quot;no shots, no service&quot; conditions. It remains to be seen in court whether this is found to be enforceable (via the &quot;failure to comply&quot; clause, exactly analogous to other emergency powers allowing restrictions on gatherings etc. previously).
The law is known to everyone in theory. But as various people are said to have said, In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. Starting from zero and actually finding out what law is applicable to your circumstances is not a trivial matter. To have an answer you can rely on you need to do the following: Find out what law calls it. Sometimes this is obvious, but not always. Go and find the law in question. Over the last 10 years this has got much easier. It used to mean going to your city library and looking up the relevant law. These days we have Google (other search engines are available). Find any other laws which might have bearing on the matter. This can be a long way from obvious (see below). Find any relevant appeal court cases in which something like your circumstances have arisen, and figure out how they relate to your actual situation. You may find that some of the laws which you read in Stage 3 have been ruled unconstitutional, or that the standard of evidence required to prove or disprove something about it has been set impossibly high, or that the penalties or damages have been set absurdly high or absurdly low. If you are in the US then maybe some of those precedents were set in other circuits, in which case you need to figure out what your local circuit is likely to do about it should the occasion arise. Make a calm, dispassionate decision about what to do about your situation. Many people find this extremely difficult. The answer might be life-changing. Under these circumstances making a good decision is very hard. Just to give you an idea about (3), suppose you are planning on importing something for your business. Here is a list of areas of the law you might fall foul of, off the top of my head and I've probably missed some: Tax. Trade in endangered species. Drug prohibition. Environmental protection. Biosecurity. Health and safety. Consumer protection. And that is just the criminal laws. Theories of civil liability can get really complicated. But OK, lets suppose you figure out the law, but despite your best efforts you find yourself in court (criminal or civil). Now in addition to all the law you find yourself enmeshed in a complicated bureaucratic set of rules, depending on the type of court and where you are (e.g. US rules of civil procedure). At this point you need to learn not just the rules but how to play the game they describe. Think of it like playing chess; learning how the pieces move is only the first step on the long road to becoming a competent chess player. And the legal system is like chess in another way; there are no do-overs if you make the wrong move. (Incidentally, anyone who says "Well lets just get rid of all the complicated rules and laws" is committing the fallacy of Chesterton's Fence. Just because you can't see why the rules are there doesn't mean there isn't a good reason). Or you could just hire a lawyer.
Let's look at what they say: Pennsylvania does not have any statutory laws governing assisted reproductive technology. True Pennsylvania’s laws regarding sperm donors come only from case law that are specific to the facts of the case being considered by the court. True and trivial given the previous sentence. Pennsylvania courts have found sperm donor contracts to be legally enforceable. True, that's what Ferguson v McKiernan says in the first paragraph of the decision. Your statement that "PA case law falls strongly on the side of not respecting donor contracts" is, at least as far as the case you cite, flatly wrong. In other cases, the contract may or may not be enforcable indeed the court agrees with this specifically: Although locating future cases on this spectrum may call upon courts to draw very fine lines, courts are no strangers to such tasks, and the instant case, which we must resolve, is not nearly so difficult. This also directly supports the previous sentence. Therefore, even if you go through a fertility clinic, a contract between the donor and the intended parents would need to be in place before the conception. True, this is exactly what Ferguson v McKiernan says. You assert that Ferguson v McKiernan says "donation through a clinic does not make a sperm donor the legal father", however, it doesn't say that at all. The status of the doner as the father was never an issue - both parties agreed that he was the biological father and the court accepted that. What was at issue is if he had the rights and obligations of a father that had been removed by the contract. The lower courts held that the contract was unenforcable as being contrary to public policy because it removed rights from the children who were not parties to the contract. However, the State Supreme Court held that the contract was enforcable. TL;DR What they say on their website is not misleading.
The simplest method is to demonstrate the falsity of the claims: this is simpler than pursuing punitive action against the opposition because in addition to demonstrate the falsity of the claims, you have to demonstrate willfulness and deceitfulness of the oppositions actions. In reading appellate decisions, you will often encounter statement by the higher court that the losing part urges so-and-so, or that the lower court applied a law or doctrine incorrectly, and they explain why that is in error. Such snippets are an excellent model for rebutting incorrect legal claims, although they are usually just the "executive summary" of the refutation. If one side cites Bronston v. United States, 409 U.S. 352, Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 and Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 as case-law support for the proposition that courts should defer to the interpretation of government agencies whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute, so long as Congress has not spoken directly to the precise issue at question, a refutation would draw on those decisions to show that the three citations do not support the proposition (in my example, it would be unnecessary to do this because it is patently obvious that this is a wildly irrational argument, but many cases depend on a deeper reading of the case law). Rather than focusing on accusations of gibberish, you could focus on establishing the lack of legal merits behind the opposing side's claim.
Breathalyzer tests are distinct from blood tests because the former does not "implicat[e] significant privacy concerns" (see Birchfeld v. ND). A cell phone is like a blood test, because it implicates significant privacy concerns, especially the level of electro-snooping that would be required to determine if someone had recently committed a phone-use offense. As the court held, Because the impact of breath tests on privacy is slight, and the need for BAC testing is great, the Fourth Amendment permits warrantless breath tests incident to arrests for drunk driving. A breath test might (but also might not) also satisfy the exigent-circumstances exception (waiting some number of hours for a warrant can easily result in the destruction of evidence), but a cell phone case could not give rise to such an exception. It should perhaps be noted that the "implied consent" laws are misnamed, because consent is not the issue. The 4th Amendment ban is on unreasonable searches, not unconsented searches. If you actually consent, it is reasonable for the police to search. I am not aware of any ruling to the effect that "because the defendant consented, the search is valid". In the context of breathalyzer law and case-law, an essential component of what makes the search reasonable is that it is incident to an arrest. With or without consent, or an implied consent law, Having assessed the effect of BAC tests on privacy interests and the need for such tests, we conclude that the Fourth Amendment permits warrantless breath tests incident to arrests for drunk driving. Extending "implied consent" to cause-unrelated searches of cars, homes, or body cavities might not pass strict scrutiny. The state has a legitimate interest in public safety which justifies some minimal intrusion, but adding a provision that "when you drive, you give implied consent to searches of everything" is not narrowly tailored. But since driving is a privilege and not a right, the state has much more leeway to give you an ultimatum: if you don't cooperate with the search, you can lose your license. On the other hand, SCOTUS has not actually approved of this slogan about driving being a privilege. Something noteworthy from Birchfield is that the court also disapproves of blood tests because a less invasive method of achieving the result is available, and they grant that "Imposition of a warrant requirement for every BAC test would likely swamp courts, given the enormous number of drunk-driving arrests, with little corresponding benefit". There being no less-invasive alternative means of realizing the legitimate state interest in stopping distracted driving, I actually expect that when this comes to pass and the matter ends up at SCOTUS, there will be another important change in search law (but "implied consent" will still be irrelevant).
Are there any underlying reasons behind the nonsensical structure of U.S.C. titles? Is it simply a case of "This is how it's been for awhile, don't fix what isn't broken." or is there more to it than that? First of all, the United States Code is generally not designed to be used by non-lawyers. Second, one of the main ways to research case law interpreting a statute is by doing a boolean search on the code section of that statute. Every time you change a title or section number, you impair the ability of people doing legal research (both judges and lawyers) to find previous case law interpreting the meaning of the statute. Third, you make it much harder to determine when the substance of the provision was originally enacted (e.g. if you want legislative history or to determine which of two conflicting statutory provisions was enacted first) since an annotated statute will often show when the current section was enacted but will not explain what it was derived from. Fourth, the location of a statute within the context of other statutory sections often informs its meaning. Machine gun may have one definition in two or three laws, and a different one in two or three other laws, and there may be yet other laws where machine gun is an undefined term. Moving a statutory section from one part of the code to another could influence the default definition that one uses for an undefined term changing substantive law. Fifth, usually a new codification will also involve some drafting standards, for example, to add gender neutrality or to avoid notoriously ambiguous constructions (like 250 word sentences). But, it isn't at all uncommon for very slight changes like the position of a comma or the formatting of a section with multiple indents, to result in a change of the likely meaning of a somewhat ambiguous statute and it is pretty much impossible to know a priori when a statutory section is ambiguous until you are confronted with a fact pattern that makes the ambiguity in that context clear. This isn't confined to obscure laws of little importance. For example, the question of whether Obamacare applied in states that hadn't set up their own exchanges hinged on these kinds of issues. None of this is to say that you should never recodify the statutes. But, a basically aesthetic motivation that mostly matters to people who make up a tiny portion of the main users of the product (non-lawyers) that poses multiple threats to how statutes will be located using legal research tools, and how it will be interpreted once located, means that reorganizing statutes is not something to be done lightly. In short, there are a lot of serious, substantive costs that can accompany a recodification of a law. As a result, re-codification is most often done only as part of an overall omnibus reform of an area of law on the merits where the interest in being able to track prior interpretive caselaw and determine the original meaning of a statute enacted long ago is at its lowest. Barring the even more ridiculous case of Congress repealing everything and passing the exact same laws again, just under different Titles/Chapters/etc, This is not so ridiculous. Most states have done exactly that one or two times in their history (sometimes more for older states). Also, many newly admitted to the union states also do something similar. For example, the basic template for the statutes in Colorado was the statutes of the state of Illinois. Basically, the first time around, somebody started with an Illinois statute book, eliminated Illinois specific laws and laws that they didn't like, rearranged them and adopted them as the original statutes of the State of Colorado (it may have actually been version 2.0 after a stopgap set of statutes, I don't recall which). Also, most states completely repeal and readopt all of their statutes in codified form on the recommendation of the codifier to a legislative committee, to reflect the acts passed in the previous session, every year. This doesn't involve overhauls really, but in principle is a complete repeal and reenactment. While the federal government has never overhauled the entire U.S. Code in this manner, it has been done at the level of individual titles of the U.S. Code. For example, the most recent major reorganization and overhaul of the structure of the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26) was in 1986. The copyright laws were overhauled in the late 1970s. Both of those accompanied major substantive changes in those areas of law. Another major recodification of many parts of the U.S. Code took place following 9-11 in connection with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which reorganized both the bureaucracy and the associated U.S. Code language associated with dozens of federal agencies. would it be possible for Congress to arbitrarily merge, combine, and delete Titles, and to rearrange the location of laws, definitions, etc? Are there laws/regulations governing this? Yes. Congress can do so any time it wants by passing a bill (it would be the longest bill ever - dozens of volumes long) doing so, and getting the President to sign it. The legislative process would be exactly the same as any other bill.
It is the job of the judge to instruct the jury about the law. If Texas had pattern instructions I'd look up what the instruction is for this matter, but you don't, so I don't know what the judge would say. But it is the judge's sole prerogative to instruct the jury in the law. If the question is a "commitment question", then it is an improper question and should be disallowed, see Stendefer v. State. The question "Would you presume someone guilty if he or she refused a breath test on their refusal alone?" is such a commitment question, and is disallowed. Similarly, "If the evidence, in a hypothetical case, showed that a person was arrested and they had a crack pipe in their pocket, and they had a residue amount in it, and it could be measured, and it could be seen, is there anyone who could not convict a person, based on that" (Atkins v. State, 951 S.W.2d 787). An improper commitment question could be of the type "could you refrain...": Let us assume that you are considering in the penalty phase of any capital murder case, okay? And some of the evidence that has come in shows that the victim's family was greatly impacted and terribly grieved and greatly harmed by the facts․Can you assure us that the knowledge of those facts would not prevent you or substantially impair you in considering a life sentence in such a case (Penry v. State, 903 S.W.2d 715). One way in which a commitment question can be legal is if it asks basically "can you uphold the law?", for example "can you consider probation in a murder case?", or "are you willing to consider mitigating circumstances". The wrong answer to those questions will lead to a for-cause dismissal. The third question is flagrantly improper, the first is rather improper, and the second probably is. If the question can be framed in terms of a candidate's willingness to follow the law, then it should be legal.