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Abortion Clinic regulation Constitutionality Court cases

Supreme Court invalidates Texas abortion law (H.B. 2)

By a 5-3 vote, the US Supreme Court today invalidated two key features of Texas’s H.B. 2. In an opinion by Justice Breyer, the Court invalidated the requirement that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals and the requirement that abortion clinics meet the standards Texas sets for ambulatory surgical centers. Here is a link to the opinion.  http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_p8k0.pdf

Because the vote was 5-3, Justice Scalia’s participation in the decision would not have affected the outcome.

Justice Thomas’s dissent notes that the decision “exemplifies the Court’s troubling tendency ‘to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.'” He continued: “I write separately to emphasize how today’s decision perpetuates the Court’s habit of applying different rules to different constitutional rights–especially the putative right to abortion.”

Richard M.

Richard Myers

Richard S. Myers, the Vice-President of UFL, is Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law, where he teaches Antitrust, Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Constitutional Law, and Religious Freedom. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College and earned his law degree at Notre Dame, where he won the law school's highest academic prize. He began his legal career by clerking for Judge John F. Kilkenny of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Myers also worked for Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C. He taught at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law before joining the Ave Maria faculty. He is a co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (Catholic University of American Press, 2004) and a co-editor of Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy (Scarecrow Press, 2007). He has also published extensively on constitutional law in law reviews and also testified before Congressional and state legislative hearings on life issues. Married to Mollie Murphy, who is also on the faculty at Ave Maria School of Law, they are the proud parents of six children - Michael, Patrick, Clare, Kathleen, Matthew, and Andrew. http://www.avemarialaw.edu/index.cfm?event=faculty.bio&pid=11705E7D4E0111010366