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Last term the newly empowered conservative majority on the Supreme Court demonstrated to all that precedent is not so precedential, even when it had stood for nearly fifty years.  They very nearly did it again, but just missed, targeting precedent on religious exemptions and vaccine mandates that has been around for more than twice as long.

Continue Reading Vaccine Mandates and Religion at the Supreme Court

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We have tried to be pretty balanced in addressing a number of decisions over the last few months relating to lawsuits brought by the euphemistically labeled “vaccine hesitant” and their brethren who advocate aggressively for entitlement to “alternative” medical treatments like anti-parasitic (veterinary) drugs.  We have been restrained in treating these lawsuits as having been

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We reported two weeks ago on the poorly conceived and ill-fated attempt by students to enjoin a public university from mandating COVID-19 vaccines.  There simply is no fundamental right under the Constitution to refuse vaccination, which has been firmly established for more than 100 years.  Now the Seventh Circuit has agreed.

Let’s be candid about

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All of us are long-time defenders of prescription medical product manufacturers, and some of us are veterans of the vaccine wars of the 1980s and 1990s involving DPT vaccine and thimerosal.  We are big fans of vaccines and the tremendous health benefits they have bestowed on humanity, and are mystified by the alliance between anti-vaccine

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How many of us entered law school dreaming of following the paths of Brandeis, Marshall, etc. in the field of constitutional law? How many of us now can go weeks, or even months, without reading a Supreme Court case? Paying off student loans led many of us to work for law firms where there was

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Last week, in Timbs v. Indiana, ___ S. Ct. ___, 2019 WL 691578 (U.S. Feb. 20, 2019), the Court unanimously held that the Excessive Fines Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment applies to the states:

Under the Eighth Amendment, “[e]xcessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual

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We’ve blogged a number of times about the Dormant Commerce Clause (“DCC”) as an additional basis for bolstering both preemption and Due Process arguments.  Here’s another prescription drug-based example.

The state of New York decided to impose a special tax on opioid manufacturers to finance various responses to the so-called “opioid epidemic.”  The tax came