Let's talk about this case. Settle in for a thread, please. supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/…
https://twitter.com/publichistory/status/1437442884870057987
Jacobson v. Mass is a Supreme Court case from 1905. Massachusetts had a law stating that the board of health or a city or town could “require and enforce the vaccinations and revaccination of all inhabitants thereof.”
The fine for noncompliance was $5. Physicians could certify certain children as “unfit subjects for vaccination.”
In 1902, Cambridge ordered everyone to be vaccinated against smallpox. Jacobson didn’t get vaccinated. The government, through a physician who was enforcing the mandate, told Jacobson he would prosecuted if he didn’t comply. Jacobson still refused.
In a reminder that nothing is new under the sun, Jacobson said that the law violated his constitutional rights — namely, the Preamble of the Constitution, the 14th amendment, and the general spirit of the Constitution.
In a reminder that sometimes we should all act like grown-ups, the Court referred to Jacobson’s insistence that the vaccine was dangerous as his mere “personal opinion, which could not be taken as correct, or given effect.”
Jacobson was convicted and charged 5 dollars. He took the case to the US Supreme Court.
In its decision, the Supreme Court held that the Preamble to the Constitution and the “spirit” of the Constitution don’t create rights that can be violated. For the Court to act on something in the Constitution, it has to be explicitly addressed in the text.
The Court moved to on to addressing whether the FEDERAL constitution is violated by a STATE vaccine mandate and decided that it is not.
In a point that I cannot, as we say here, emphasize enough, the Court said that real liberty can’t exist when we act on our own “regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
The Court said each citizen has a covenant with the “whole people” and the whole people with each citizen that we are governed for the common good.
The Court said that Massachusetts, through the Cambridge Board of Health, had the authority to to protect the community against “an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
The Court said that individual rights to bodily autonomy are of course important, but those rights sometimes give way to the protection of the community.
As an example, it offered an American returning from another country where a disease is rampant and needing to quarantine despite not exhibiting any symptoms.
Deciding among competing methods for addressing public health is a legislative function, not a judicial one, the Court told us.
There are guardrails around the legislature, of course, but the Court isn’t just going to second guess a legislative decision because the Court might have preferred a different decision.
The Court cited another decision in which the Court found that it’s ok to require smallpox vaccinations in order for children to attend school.
There are lots of paragraphs in this opinion where the Court explains that medical authorities and historical experience demonstrate that the benefits of vaccines outweigh any risks associated with them.
The Court said it won’t give the minority of the public who disagree with vaccinations veto power over the legislature or the ability to compromise the well-being of an entire community.
When you hear people talking about Jacobson, please keep in mind that the Supreme Court was analyzing a state government’s power to require its citizens to be vaccinated. It was not analyzing the federal government’s power, which is an entirely different question.
Anyone who tells you how a court today is going to analyze the Biden Covid-19 framework is speaking with a lot of confidence about something that I think is pretty uncertain. - b
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