Oregon Assisted Suicide

As the papers have emphasizing, the Oregon assisted suicide case was decided as a case of statutory interpretation, and it was about Federal and State sovereignty. As The National Law Journal's Marcia Cole stated on PBS' The News Hour,

It was partly a states' rights case but I would say it was really more of a statutory interpretation case, sort of the bread and butter stuff that the Supreme Court does in most of its cases. They were interpreting a statute.

Similarly, in the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse wrote,

While the court's decision was based on standard principles of administrative law, and not on the Constitution, it was clearly influenced by the majority's view that the regulation of medical practice belonged, as a general matter, to the states. Mr. Ashcroft acted contrary to "the background principles of our federal system," Justice Kennedy said in his 28-page opinion.

Punchline: the six members in the majority determined that Congress never intended for the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 to give the national government such far reaching pwoers, and, related, certainly there was no statutory authorization for the Attorney General to claim this authority.

A recurring argument in the study of Constitutional Law is the appropriate standard of interpretation. Those of us in Law and Judicial Process last semester read about interpretative strategies, and featured prominently was Justice Antonin Scalia, who holds himself, and is sometimes held by others, to be "principled" in his interpretive practices, all the while accusing others of picking and choosing, or following their personal preferences.

Against that background, you might find interesting this Slate.Com piece by Will Saletan, analyzing Scalia's reasoning in the recent abortion and assisted suicide cases.

The Thesis, from the intorductory paragraph, is:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling on assisted suicide. On Wednesday, it handed down a ruling on abortion. As Justice Antonin Scalia has often observed, judges are supposed to stick to principles, not change them to suit personal preferences from one issue to the next. But evidently, that advice doesn't apply to Scalia.