Before the bulk of the meeting discussion, trustees heard about an hour of public comment from community members. The vast majority advocated for masks to be optional for students in the upcoming year.
mandate, any kind of vaccine mandate, and you ve got some leaders taking this fight all the way to the supreme court and losing. the court has now declined to block indiana university s requirement that on campus students be vaccinated. they re letting this requirement stand as students get ready for the start of classes soon. several other schools put in place similar rules, also facing lawsuits. i want to bring in justice correspondent pete williams on what this means. let me make sure i m understanding this and see if you can help us explain this. this decision is made by the full court and by one justice who dismissed this challenge on behalf of the court that justice was amy coney barrett, looks at cases, the challenges coming in from that region. given the politicization of vaccine mandates shall the fact she was appointed by donald trump, some conservatives were surprised by what she did. should they have so shocked? no, i don t think so. for a couple of reasons. first of all,
we re in indiana. this was the first time the supreme court had been asked to consider a vaccine mandate. it was brought this challenge was brought by a handful of students at indiana university, challenging that school s vaccine mandate that s set to take effect in the beginning of the fall semester. they wanted the courts to issue an emergency order to block it while the appeals court process played out. they lost in the district court. they lost in the federal appeals court and that opinion was interesting because it based its reasoning back on a 1905 decision that the supreme court issued allowing a vaccine mandate for the smallpox. and that court said that iu was even on stronger legal footing because the iu mandate, like many others, allows exceptions for people with religious or medical objections. but that didn t stop the students here. they went to the supreme court and they went specifically to amy coney barrett because she has jurisdiction over the
freedoms. let s get your legal questions answered with a cnn legal analyst and former state and federal prosecutor. all right. let s tick through these things. people wonder what can and cannot happen here. can states require residents to get vaccinated against covid-19? this is an easy yes. we know this because the supreme court told us over 100 years ago in a famous case from 1905 called jacobson versus massachusetts where they mandated that all of the residents in that state or commonwealth get vaccinated against smallpox. the supreme court said that s completely fine. the supreme court ruled it s within the police power of a state to enact a vaccination law. there are politics involved in this. what you have to show is a state is a reasonable medical need. there is going to be politics behind this. no state has done this yet. they absolutely can. what about federal
laura, the reason i bring up attorney thing is one of the key questions here is have these requirements been challenged? what does the case law say about various types of vaccine requirements? so there have been a bunch of lawsuits and they ve all been losers so far. mostly it s been students saying, hey, i don t want to have a mandatory vaccine at my school. judge looked at indiana university, public university, a bunch of students sued and the court said, no, it is constitutional to mandate a vaccine. the basic idea here is that states have an obligation to protect their citizens it s called police power. 1905 the supreme court said they could do this in the context of massachusetts doing it for smallpox. this has happened a lot. the courts repeatedly upheld it. typically employers make two exceptions, two carve outs. they re narrow, right for religious grounds, very few religions say that you can t get a vaccine. hardly ever comes up. then also certain medical conditions. what if