5 ms·
Quarantining the sick is legal but otherwise the freedom of assembly clause in the 1st amendment does not say "except when there is a pandemic or other fear".
by edoo 6y ago
Quarantining the sick is legal but otherwise the freedom of assembly clause in the 1st amendment does not say "except when there is a pandemic or other fear". If you don't believe that should be the law fine, but since it is law and is incorporated to the states via the 14th amendment it qualifies as illegal.
- bobthepanda 6y agoNot quite; you'd have to drag this through court to get any sort of legal determination on it.
- asdf21 6y agoAnd I think they would just say it was "reasonable" given the information known at the time.
- dwaltrip 6y agoCan you please provide links to judicial opinions or rulings that validate your interpretation of the law?
- edoo 6y agoIf you read the federalist papers you'll note that the intention was literal, not to be reinterpreted for the times. That also makes the thousands of gun laws illegal. If you start reinterpreting the constitution that is how you go full banana republic, and everyone knows you never go full banana republic. You are supposed to change the law not reinterpret.
- jcranmer 6y agoIt's pretty funny to watch people try to justify "literal" readings of the text, since they often focus on interpreting just one piece of text and ignore the effects of the analysis on the rest of the text. The First Amendment very clearly binds only Congress in its literal reading: it begins "Congress shall make no law..." And there is no literal text in any subsequent amendment that might cause incorporation to the states--the Fourteenth Amendment only literally incorporates the Fifth Amendment, and that by literal repetition of the text.
- pdonis 6y agoThe fact that legal realism--which says that the law is whatever judges say it is, even when what the judges say is patently ridiculous when compared to the actual words of the Constitution or statute--is the mainstream viewpoint in today's legal environment does not make it right.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- arcticbull 6y agoI would argue the second amendment doesn't explicitly say you can't own a nuclear warhead for personal amusement, but I would argue nobody's going to challenge the validity of such impositions.
- ta1771 6y agoProbably because they know it's futile, not because it shouldn't be covered under the Amendment.
- curryst 6y agoIt almost certainly shouldn't be covered. It states "being necessary to the security of a free State". What part of a nuclear warhead wielded by a militia contributes to the security of a free State? Nuclear weapons are rather unique in that they're essentially useless in a civil war. What are you going to do? Nuke the very land that you're fighting over? Biological and nuclear weapons should not fall in the scope of the 2nd amendment. They're useless for guaranteeing your liberties against a tyrannical government, and the consequences for storing them improperly are severe.
- pdonis 6y ago> What part of a nuclear warhead wielded by a militia contributes to the security of a free State? Depends on who's attacking and what might deter them. > They're useless for guaranteeing your liberties against a tyrannical government Which is only part of "the security of a free State", not all of it. The militia was also for repelling foreign invasions. Given our current modern world, I would agree that weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, and chemical) shouldn't be available to anyone who wants them; but the correct legal way to make that happen in the U.S. would be to amend the Constitution to explicitly add that exception to the Second Amendment. As the Second Amendment is currently written, it does not admit of any exceptions. As I noted in another comment upthread, privately owned warships were significant at the time the Second Amendment was passed, and the framers of the Amendment did not exempt them from the category of "arms".
- 6y ago
- jcranmer 6y agoFreedom of assembly, like the other 1st amendment freedoms, can be regulated by government so long, per prior SCOTUS decisions. They key is that restrictions must be content-neutral and can only pertain to "time, place, and manner," additionally surviving strict scrutiny (which, in plain English, means "there's no other way to do it"). This is bread-and-butter First Amendment court case stuff; any US government class that's at least halfway competent ought to have covered this. The coronavirus bans on public gathering are fairly clearly permissible under SCOTUS precedent.