NEWS: Judge Rules Fertilized Eggs Are Human Beings

my wish is that a homosexual , black man goes off the dick for 1 day only to meet the bush twins whereupon they willingly consent to unsafe sex in a torrid threesome leaving them both pregnant ...what then???

i cried all night yesterday when i couldn't find the hair i lost, all that dna, all those potential clones brutally denied the chance to live just because i dropped my hair.

So, when they overturn Roe Vs. Wade who is planning on seceeding?

They say that life begins at conception. All we need now is some freakish definition of conception and everything will be peachy.

fucking genius

by the way - wrongful death? bollocks. gross negligence? absolutely.

"death"...goddamn idiots

this is such fucking bull shit! when will the maddness end!

Conception is the thought that first occurs to the mother that she may want to have sex. The nature of that sex does not have to be reproductive, nor does the mother have to intend to reproduce from the act, but if she were to become pregnant, the moment of conception would be defined as then. Not really, but it's the way we're heading with all of this crap. Why is it in IL that life begins at conception but in KY it begins at live birth or once the fetus can survive on its own outside the womb? Rediculous, all of it.

I hate to break it to you but that means nothing. "Activist judges" cite law when they issue their opinions. They don't just take off their robes and dance around throwing bananas and say "we don't care about the law, fuckers!" when they rule.

This whole "activist judges" thing really pisses me off. Unless you live in Louisiana, which has a civil code tradition, we live in a system descended from the common law. Common law is judge made law. Judges have been "legislating from the bench" for hundreds of years under the common law system. Get over it. It's the system we have and that has worked for centuries. We're not undoing it now because people don't like abortion rights.

the law says at conception!!! Those were god damned eggs!! there was no conceiving of anything!! I make eggs and discard of them all the time!! Am i going to jail just for menstrating!!???
Illinois, one more state to put on the list of places i will never go!!

They were fertilized, I think.

Makes you wonder, though -- Nature told this couple that they shouldn't have kids, but they pressed on. Bad luck (an accident) told them they really shouldn't have kids, but they're still pressing on, and now hope to (after appeals) make a bunch of money.

Maybe they should take the hint and adopt one of the millions of children that are already born and unwanted.

good call!!!

I'm going to steal this line from the late great Bill Hicks. " Your not a human being until your in my phonebook."

Life begins at conception... discarding, and thus killing, a fertilized egg is wrongful death... but there was more than one egg. So some of them were going to be discarded anyway. Who's to blame for those "deaths"?

If the embryos are "human beings", why weren't the "parents" arrested for child endangerment for having them frozen?

BINGO! I was just wondering this myself. Two faced bastards.

This is exactly right.

You know, I didn't know how much I didn't know about how law and the courts work until my spouse went to law school. Seems like some of the very basic concepts should be taught in high school.

I'm a math geek and think it would just find if we replaced a good amount of the "advanced" math taught in HS with economics, law, and statistics (in service of developing a decent bullshit detector.).

But that would be controversial -- "Today class we're going to disect candidate X's stance on social security." Eeek!

Edit: Spelling -- again.



[Edited on Feb 07, 2005 11:14AM]

Thanks.

When I was in high school we had, I think, a one semester course that was a sort of civics class that tried to teach some of the basics of the legal system along with some other polisci 101 type stuff. I also had an econ class that I can't remember at all. It would be great to get rid of some of the math overload... my high school had it particularly bad b/c it was a math/science magnet school.

It's sort of wacked how skewed high school is towards teaching math... this is why an 800 on the GRE math section is in the 95% (i.e. 5% of test takers make a perfect score) and a 750 on the GRE verbal section is 99% (i.e. a tiny fraction of 1% of test takers make a perfect score). By the time those math peoples get through college and to the GRE they just demolish the math section, but the hapless humanities people are still not even masters of their own disciplines.

It would be awesome if high schools started paying more attention to the humanities in general and law, econ, statistics and history in particular.

Well, no. Activist judges use the current law as the basis for creating new law by interpretation of what the think the law means, rather than what it actually says. In this case, he cited the actual law as written as the basis for his decision, but no 'new' law was created.

Actually, no. Common law is a term that was first introduced in England when King Henry the Second unified the legal system under one 'common' law for all his subjects, rather than the arbitrary system that varied fro locale to locale. From then on, judgement was based on the traditional interpretation of the common laws, and this carried on until the mid-nineteenth century at which time laws were written down, or codified. Once the codification became commonplace, every judge, lawyer, scholar, and citizen were held to the same definition, the same application, and the same requirements. The only variations in the laws were ones created by the legeslature, not the judicial branch.

So, it appears that 'activist judges' are the ones trying to undo a system that has worked for ~200 years, and not the people opposing abortion. Now that your history lesson is over with, I invite you to restate your point, using real facts rather than the ones you pull out of your ass.

I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were going to have a real discussion since you started throwing around the term "activist judges" as though it means something other than "liberal judges that we don't like." Hence my caricature of the common law based system we live under. The nineteenth century codification of the common law in the UK does not really interest us, here, because the common law that was received by the states developed independently of the English common law system after the American Revolution. There is no such thing as federal common law, exactly, despite what Floyd Abrams might tell you.

But, yes, in the United States in most jurisdictions much of what was "common law" has been codified. But our system remains one which is based on case precedent and judge made interpretations that define the contours of statutory law. In practice, this means that while judges do not make "new" law (i.e. they do not invent or "discover" new torts), judges in the US can interpret laws in ways that in effect create new causes of action. This is nothing new.

They teach you in the first week of law school that you always start with the statute and then move to binding case law, persuasive case law, and down the line in order to understand what the law means. But you always have to look to CASE law to see what the "law as written" means. There is nothing new in that either, is there?

The first point is that reasonable minds can differ on what the law means. It's usually NOT the case that you can just use "the law as written" because the law as written can not anticipate all the possible circumstances that may surround the application of the law. It's very rare indeed that the statutory language is clear w/r/t questions of law.

So judges have to figure out what the law means in specific circumstances. This is what judges have always done in the US system of state and federal courts. The judges have to go back and look at legislative history, case law, and other interpretive aids to render a competent and considered judgment about what the law means in thus-and-such specific circumstance.

I have a real problem with saying that when judge A looks at law X and comes up with interpretation/meaning Y, he is using "good faith efforts" to interpret the "law as written" but when judge B looks at law X and comes up with interpretation/meaning Z, she is an "activist judge" making new law.

The criticism of "activist judges" purports to be a criticism of a type of interpretive METHOD rather than a criticism of the OUTCOME, right? Please explain to me how you can distinguish what a so-called activist judge does in terms of METHODOLOGY from what a non-activist judge does. No one has been able to explain it to me to my satisfaction as of yet, and I pay attention to this question.

Second, in the case of federal constitutional law and state constitutional law, the judiciary is the final arbiter of what the constitution means, not the legislature.

So in the United States since Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), any variation in the basic law of the land, i.e. the US Constitution, is created by the judicial branch and not the legislature. The legislature can initiate the process of amending the US constitution, but the legislature has no authority whatsoever to interpret the constitution or change the meanings of its language apart from that.

The US Supreme Court is the final authority on what the Constitution means. It means what they say it means, absent an amendment. Most state supreme courts likewise have final authority to say what their respective state constitutions mean.

It's doubly absurd to call federal judges "activist judges" because the federal judiciary has been making "new law" w/r/t the constitution for 200+ years. Both sides of the political equation have been playing this game and evidence of this can be found throughout constitutional jurisprudence.

To give you a brief example, the Supreme Court's jurisprudence related to the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution has passed through several phases where the court has alternatively expanded and limited the grant of legislative power to congress under the Commerce Clause.

We are right now in a period of restriction of that power... the Supreme Court, in opinions authored by CJ Rehnquist, has recently drastically scaled back the areas that federal legislation can permissibly reach with the Commerce Clause in US v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), and US v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000). Though from the 1930s onward Congress could easily reach subjects only tenuously related to interstate commerce, the Lopez Court, struck down the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 on the grounds that the commerce clause did not empower Congress to regulate gun free school zones.

The Lopez majority reasoned that gun free zones were too tenuously related to interstate commerce to be supported by the commerce clause and introduced a NEW TEST for determining whether legislation could be supported by the Commerce Clause. This was a HUGE departure from 60 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence related to the Commerce Clause that severely restricts Congress's ability to regulate all kinds of activities, economic and non-economic.

So my question to you is, are Rehnquist and the majority that concurred with him (Kennedy, O'Connor, Thomas, and Scalia) activist judges?



[Edited on Feb 09, 2005 by HenryTMensch]

[Edited on Feb 09, 2005 by HenryTMensch]

No, I think they went back to the constitution and adressed the issue based on the law, rather than an interpretation of a precedent based on someone else's interpretation of that law. Futhermore, in Lopez, the court affirmed a lower court's decision that the Act in question had not one damn thing to do with commerce, and therefor found that Congress had violated it Constitutional authority. To reverse that decision would have been an 'activist' judgement. To call Lopez a restriction of congressional authority would only be true if Congress had the authority in the first place, which it didn't.

You claim it is a semantic difference based on methodology, but I think the methodology is what 'activist' refers to. If a judge finds that Jane has the right to give her apple to a man, and another judge finds the man has the right to take the apple that was given, and yet a third judge interprets the first two cases to mean that all Janes have the rights to give their apples to any man, does it follow that all men have the right to take any apple they want at will?

An activist judge would say yes, based on precedent, effectively creating a new law where men can take apples from girls named Jane. A constitutional judge will go back to the original law and decide that men only have the right to take apples that are freely given and only at the time offered.

I understand the flow of precedent and how a decision by the SCOTUS can serve as the definition of a law, but not every issue can or should be based on precedent alone. In this particular case, the judge had the letter of the law to guide him, and he based his ruling on it. By common definition, he was not an 'activist' judge.

The point is that in Lopez, as in many other cases decided by the Rehnquist majority (leaping to the top of my mind is the Lemon case and its line in Freedom of Religion jurisprudence), the Court created a new test out of whole cloth, partially based on precedent and partially based on an interpretation of the text of the Commerce Clause.

The Court didn't say definitively that guns around schools does not have "one damn thing to do with commerce" it said that the connection to interstate commerce is too attenuated to be supported by the legislative grant in the Commerce Clause. I seem to remember the Court mentioning that if Congress rewrote the legislation to make the connection clearer and satisfy the new test, the Gun Free Schools Act would be constitutional.

What the the Court said was we don't like this aggregate effects business (that had supported lots of Congressional legislation in the past) and we are going to come up with a new, equally vague test called "substantial effects." Morrison confirmed that the Court wants a greater link to interstate commerce before allowing Congress to intrude upon state legislative power. But the methodology in arriving at both tests is the same. In both instances, you have judges making new law based on the exercise of principled judicial reasoning. The result from the Rehnquist Court is a reordering of the balance of legislative power between the federal and state levels. But what the Rehnquist Court is doing is no less "activist" than what the Griswold or Roe Courts were up to.

I haven't read the opinion of this IL court or the underlying statute, but lets say, arguendo, that the statutory language was fairly clear and the IL court made an easy decision based on the text. Fine. This would not be an "activist" decision. So s5's insinuation that this was the act of an "activist judge" would not hold up. But perhaps the confusion is over the fact that what an "activist judge" is is completely opaque even to someone who has a fairly solid understanding of the courts and Constitutional Law, e.g. me.

You seem to be able to give concrete examples of what an "activist" methodology ISN'T, but you have yet to demonstrate to me what an "activist" methodology IS. Can you give me a concrete example of a holding, preferably from the Supreme Court, that would count as arrived at through an "activist" methodolgy?

When presented with a category of analysis that is intellectually bankrupt and being deployed for purely rhetorical effect, I don't really get all hot and bothered about a lay person turning the category on its head for rhetorical effect. I mean, do you imagine that GWB's remonstrations about "activist judges" in the state of the union last week were backed up by the nuanced articulation of what "activist judges" means that you have just presented?


[Edited on Feb 09, 2005 by HenryTMensch]

I hasten to add that this is certainly a semantic distinction. If for 60 years SCOTUS held that Congress had the authority, then Congress had the authority because the Constitution means what SCOTUS says it means. The textualist/"strict constructionist" premise that we have strayed from the true meaning of the Constitution and need a return to its "true" meaning bothers me almost as much as Wahabbis saying that Islam has strayed from the true path and needs a return to the true essence of the Islam practiced by the Prophet Muhammad.

The Constitution is a living document and has the meaning that SCOTUS and the rest of the federal courts give to it. The meaning changes such that the "true" meaning of the document is contingent on temporal location. There is no "true" meaning that is true without respect to the contingency of time.

[Edited on Feb 09, 2005 by HenryTMensch]

just wanted to say that i think this is a REALLY, really good point. and i'd like to hear what the judges have to say about it. of course, i don't think i will.

in any case, i don't think it's unreasonable to ask that they be compensated for this loss somehow. but wrongful death is a gross politically-slanted misinterpretation of events.