History "lite" in modern American bioethics

This article explores a disconcerting phenomenon. In recent years, in writing on the subject of assisted suicide, several bioethicists have made extraordinary historical claims. The history of Western moral theories that exhibit disapproval of all forms of suicide is well known. Nevertheless, the bioethicists have claimed that some of Europe's most prominent early modern moral philosophers never believed in the inalienable right to life. This claim is quite controversial because this right is an important basis for secular moral opposition to assisted suicide. Irrespective of whether or not opposition to assisted suicide is philosophically justified, the philosophers the bioethicists write about did in fact believe in the inalienable right to life. Bioethicists can only come to their conclusions concerning the philosophers by employing an improper historical methodology.     

The First Amendment Originalism of Justices Brennan,Scalia and Thomas

Originalism holds that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted based on the original intent or original meaning of the Constitution, that original intent is not only relevant but authoritative, and that judges are obligated to follow the framers’ original intent and meaning when resolving cases. Normative questions surrounding originalism's merit have produced one of the great constitutional debates of recent decades. This article compares and contrasts the First Amendment originalism of three justices: William Brennan, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. It examines every First Amendment opinion prior to the 2011 term written by the justices that contains originalism. The article concludes that all three justices used originalism to support a wide variety of arguments in a wide variety of First Amendment cases. In addition, the analysis demonstrates that Justices Scalia and Thomas more frequently supported the First Amendment in opinions in which they used originalism, a finding that contradicts the idea that originalism is associated with judicial restraint. The article contends that, with a few minor exceptions, none of the justices used originalism in a consistent way. Finally, the article offers perspectives on originalism's influence on current First Amendment jurisprudence and the limitations of using originalism for constitutional interpretations.     

An economic analysis of the right to a jury trial

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.… 6th Amendment, US Constitution     

美国联邦法律中的迅速审判权

迅速审判权是美国宪法第6修正案规定的宪法性权利,也是联邦<迅速审判法>规定的重要诉讼权利.迅速审判的思想起源于英国,后传播至美国并经历了漫长的发展,被认为是"不同于其它宪法权利的基本权利".美国联邦<宪法>和联邦<迅速审判法>是保护迅速审判权的两大主要法源,分别规定了不同的迅速审判权期限要求、衡量审查标准和救济途径,在保护迅速审判权上形成了各具特色的保护模式.但总体来说,迅速审判权的实现并不容易,消除程序拖延目标的实现还需更多的努力.美国迅速审判的立法与司法保护模式对完善我国刑事诉讼立法具有诸多启示.     

The first amendment at the crossroads: Free expression and new media technology

A century and a half after it became part of the Constitution, the First Amendment finally began to fulfill its promise of protecting freedom of speech and press. Only in recent decades have courts extended that protection to a broad range of expressive activity. In an era of emerging media technology, courts will be called on to establish new constitutional principles to deal with the changing communications landscape. Once unleashed, the “new”; First Amendment standards will be available to change the legacy of landmark cases that some consider to be overly‐solicitous of freedom of speech and press. Protecting the First Amendment in the cyberspace era is best accomplished not by creating new standards, but by applying and thus preserving established First Amendment principles.     

More history "lite" in modern American bioethics

This article revisits a disconcerting phenomenon. The history of prominent 17th and 18th century moral theorists who exhibited disapproval of all forms of suicide is well known. Nevertheless, there are many bioethicists who continue to claim that either these moral theorists never actually opposed suicide, or that they never believed in the inalienable right to life and liberty that is an important basis for secular moral opposition to assisted suicide. These erroneous claims evince an improper historical methodology. They originate from the bioethicists' inaccurate quotation of the moral theorists and also from the bioethicists' unwillingness to understand the moral theorists in their relevant historical context. The author concludes that this attempt to obfuscate the true history of 17th and 18th century moral theory may also be removing a line of inquiry from originalist constitutional analysis that Federal Courts have a duty to engage in.     

Television Food Marketing to Children Revisited: The Federal Trade Commission Has the Constitutional and Statutory Authority to Regulate

The evidence reveals that young children are targeted by food and beverage advertisers but are unable to comprehend the commercial context and persuasive intent of marketing. Although the First Amendment protects commercial speech, it does not protect deceptive and misleading speech for profit. Marketing directed at children may fall into this category of unprotected speech. Further, children do not have the same First Amendment right to receive speech as adults. For the first time since the Federal Trade Commission's original attempt to regulate marketing to children in the 1970s (termed KidVid), the political, scientific, and legal climate coalesce to make the time well-suited to reevaluate the FTC's authority for action. This paper analyzes the constitutional authority for the FTC to regulate television food marketing directed at children as deceptive in light of the most robust public health evidence on the subject.     

国家赔偿制度发展的宪法支撑研究

国家赔偿取得权、人权保障和政治文明分别是宪法支撑国家赔偿制度发展的“一体”和“两翼”。国家赔偿取得权是公民的基本权利,国家赔偿制度的发展应当以保障国家赔偿取得权为重点。第四次修宪特别突出的“人权保障”和“政治文明”分别对国家赔偿实体和程序制度的发展提供了宪法支撑,国家赔偿制度的修改必须体现这些宪法精神。     

Creating Legal Space for the Unborn

This article explores how the unborn moved from inhabiting an implicit mother-centric space, tacitly expressed in the Irish constitutional order, to a separate legal space created first by the Eighth Amendment and later through public discourse, judicial interpretation and failed constitutional referenda. The article opens with a brief examination of the relationship between law and space in recent scholarly works. It goes on to assess the impact of post-colonial and gender discourse in producing the first legal space in which the unborn was tacitly understood. This is followed by an exploration of how cultural and gender rhetoric gave birth to a definite legal space in which the right to life for the unborn was protected by the Constitution and the government’s subsequent attempts to solve the legal limbo by shifting the debate to the social policy space. The paper concludes by discussing the extent to which a wider, more universal space, that of human rights discourse, may have an impact on the legal space created for the unborn, by either protecting or weakening its right to life.     

The nature and basis of inalienable rights

This paper has two purposes. One is primarily (but not exclusively) conceptual and the other is normative. The first aim is to say what inalienable rights are. To explain this, inalienable rights are contrasted with the notions of forfeitable rights and absolute rights. A recent novel analysis of inalienable rights by Feinberg is explained and criticized. The first task is concluded by discussing what duties inalienable rights imply. The second aim is to see what moral principles, if any, justify designating some rights as inalienable. The claim of Nozick and others that inalienable rights must be paternalistically grounded is examined and rejected. After a brief critical discussion of the Lockean and Hobbesean accounts of the basis of inalienable rights, it is argued that the harm principle can serve as an adequate ground for categorizing at least the right to life (and perhaps other rights) as inalienable.An earlier version of this paper was read at Guilford College, Tulane University, and Wake Forest University. I have benefited from the suggestions and comments of members of those audiences and from Stephen Darwall, Thomas Hill, Jr., Edward Langerak, Ruth Lucier, James Smith, Lance Stell, Laurence Thomas, and Donald Van DeVeer.     

生命权的概念及其入宪的必要性和价值

生命权有广义和狭义之分,通常所说的生命权是指狭义上的生命权。生命权的基础性、不可逆转性和不可补偿性决定了生命权应当入宪,而生命权入宪则是对生命权基础性价值的确认和彰显,表达了对生命权的尊重,也将提高人们尊重生命权的意识,同时将进一步推动生命权保障机制的建立和完善。     

美国公开权研究

在美国,公开权是于20世纪中叶从隐私权演变而来的一项财产权利。根据这项权利,一个人(主要是知名人物)可以控制对其形象的商业开发并从中获益。目前公开权无论是在理论上,还是在立法与司法实践上,均充满争议。司法界与学术界尚没有为公开权寻找到一种科学的理论基础,因此公开权仍是一种“尚没有得到证明”的权利。赋予知名人物以公开权,会削弱社会大众根据联邦宪法第一修正案所享有的言论自由,因此应将公开权的适用范围限制在尽可能小的程度。     

First Amendment influence in argentine republic law and jurisprudence

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution has influenced the development of freedom of expression in a number of countries, including the Argentine Republic. This article focuses on law as it came to affect mass media beginning with assumptions from the 16th century, when Argentina was under Spanish domination, and continues through the 1853–60 constitutional conventions that marked the initiation of First Amendment influence in Argentine law and jurisprudence. The article explains how the de facto governments that ruled Argentina from 1862 to 1983 gave direction to law and court decisions affecting the mass media, including film censorship, press penal responsibility, prior restraint, state of siege and the right to reply. The article concludes by analyzing how these laws and court decisions have influenced media and Argentine society, especially in fostering self‐censorship.     

Privacy on the Internet

Privacy, the right to an inviolable private life, is one of the most valued and most fragile possessions in modern human society. According to only one of the best-known definitions, privacy is the right to be left alone; the right for every human being to enjoy a space protected by law from arbitrary encroachment, including that of the government. "Every unjustified violation of individual privacy by the state, whatever the means used, must be regarded as a violation of the Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution—S.S.]," as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted in his famous opinion on wiretapping.¹ Privacy is a fundamental human right, and it has been meticulously studied and analyzed. According to one classification scheme,² privacy can provisionally be divided into four types: privacy of personal data, physical privacy, territorial privacy, and the privacy of communications.     

Conforming to the rule of law: when person and human being finally mean the same thing in Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence

The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to protect people from discrimination and harm from other people. Racism is not the only thing people need protection from. As a constitutional principle, the Fourteenth Amendment is not confined to its historical origin and purpose, but is available now to protect all human beings, including all unborn human beings. The Supreme Court can define "person" to include all human beings, born and unborn. It simply chooses not to do so. Science, history and tradition establish that unborn humans are, from the time of conception, both persons and human beings, thus strongly supporting an interpretation that the unborn meet the definition of "person" under the Fourteenth Amendment. The legal test used to extend constitutional personhood to corporations, which are artificial "persons" under the law, is more than met by the unborn, demonstrating that the unborn deserve the status of constitutional personhood. There can be no "rule of law" if the Constitution continues to be interpreted to perpetuate a discriminatory legal system of separate and unequal for unborn human beings. Relying on the reasoning of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court may overrule Roe v. Wade solely on the grounds of equal protection. Such a result would not return the matter of abortion to the states. The Fourteenth Amendment, properly interpreted, would thereafter prohibit abortion in every state.     

Assisted suicide and the inalienable right to life

This article focuses on a topic largely overlooked by both the supporters and opponents of assisted suicide. The legalization of suicide assistance damages the interests of persons who value the law's full and equal protection of their lives by designating them as eligible for help in killing themselves. Measures such as Oregon's Death with Dignity Act regard every person diagnosed as having a terminal condition as a candidate for suicide assistance, as if the protection of life was an alienable interest for this class. Thus all members of the eligible class, including those opposed to assisted suicide, lose the status of being regarded by law as having an inalienable right to the protection of life. This status-based injury should inform the standing and substantive constitutional questions raised by a state's adoption of such a policy.     

搜查与隐私权保护——加拿大宪法与美国宪法第4修正案之比较

<加拿大权利与自由宪章>第8条赋予了公民反对不合理的搜查和扣押的权利.与美国宪法第4修正案的发展历程类似,经由加拿大最高法院的判例解释,<宪章>第8条确立了隐私权的宪法保护.基于对美国宪法判例的批判和借鉴,<宪章>第8条下的隐私权在判断标准、保护范围方面体现了本国特色.第8条下隐私权具备的丰富内涵,不仅得益于加拿大最高法院确立的隐私权旨在促进的诸项基本价值,也与加拿大较为宽泛的非法证据排除规则有关.     

Blood Will Not Justify My Relation: Same‐Sex Couples and their Battle for Standing as De Facto Parents

A parent's right to maintain a relationship with his/her child lies within the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution; however, this right does not apply to every type of parent. Although the U.S. Supreme Court granted same‐sex couples the right to marry, they still face parental rights issues when their child(ren) are nonbiological or nonadoptive because they lack standing for custody and/or visitation as de facto parents. Moreover, the rise of nontraditional same‐sex‐couple families has been placing states in a predicament, and the lack of uniform rights for de facto parents creates great inconsistency across the United States. The creation of a uniform statute with specific elements distinguishing de facto parents from mere caretakers will grant same‐sex nonbiological parents standing and create uniformity across the United States.     

谈现代科技的发展与宪法(学)的关系

现代科技发展十分迅猛,对宪法和宪法学都带来了深刻的影响。文章两位作者就现代科技发展对宪法(学)发展的贡献,现代科技发展对宪法(学)的冲击和挑战,特别是器官移植与生命权、克隆人与宪法价值、基因检测与公民的平等权、信息传播与公民的隐私权、因特网技术与宪政体制和基本权利等问题展开了讨论。宪法(学)也不是消极地应对科技的发展,而是积极地回应,一方面给现代科技的发展提供支持,另一方面也为限制现代科技发展的负面效应提出有效的对策。现代科技的发展应该回归到宪法的价值体制之内。     

论法人的基本权利主体地位

美国宪法并没有规定公司是基本权利主体,美国联邦最高法院在很多判例中亦认定美国宪法的特权与豁免条款不适用于公司。宪法第14修正案通过后,尤其是自19世纪80年代以来,美国联邦最高法院逐渐将宪法的保护扩大适用于公司,使得公司成为某些宪法基本权利的主体。这一转变迎合了美国经济发展的需要,使得国内统一大市场的建立成为可能。本文借鉴美国的宪法实践,细致梳理了公司作为基本权利主体的相关理论。