grendel s den sued. they got a really good, somewhat famous lawyer to argue their side all the way up to the supreme court of the united states. and in 1982, in fact, in an 8-1 decision authored by the chief justice, the united states supreme court sided with the bar, they sided with grendel s den. nothing against the church, of course, but the supreme court ruled that massachusetts had crossed into unconstitutional territory when it, quote, delegated to private nongovernmental entities a power normally invested in agencies of government. the court said by doing that, the law substituted the church s own views, whatever they may be and regardless of what they re based on, the church substituted the church s own motivations to act, quote, for the reason decision making of a public legislative body acting on evidence and guided bystanders on issues with significant economic and political
decided they wanted to open their current basement location as a proper bar. and in order to open as a bar, they had to apply to the city for a state-regulated liquor license. and that s where today s gift to you comes from, because back then if you walked out the back door of grendel s den, the next building you would encounter across the alley, little courtyard thing there, was a church, the holy cross catholic church. that church has since moved out to the suburbs. i think where the church was is now a pete s coffee. i don t know, it s all changed over the years. so they applied to be a bar and their door across the back alley was a door to a church. that was really, really important. because a massachusetts state law at the time gave churches the right and the opportunity to veto any liquor license application for any business that was near to them.
of business, what they can do is say, you sue us for $10,000 or 10 million, because there is no limit put on the statute, and we ll sue you for double that. do you want to try? i think a lot of the people who would waltz into court and exercise this impermissibly delegated power over abortion will think twice several times. interestingly, the point about the grendel s den case and all of this talk about private power, is that even a justice who doesn t believe in roe v. wade, who doesn t think there is a basic right to abortion would have to confront all these precedents that say even if what you re doing is not something that s especially protected by
here. what was at issue here was that the government, the state, can t let some random entity, a church, a school, some other private entity make that decision. it s a governmental decision. you cannot delegate it to a private entity to make that determination for its own purposes. that is standing supreme court precedent from 1982, that decision. that professor who took it to the united states and won named lawrence tribe has sort of set off a flare warning that the texas abortion ban that the u.s. supreme court let pass into law last week, he said that s basically the grendel s den case all over again. he said, as with the massachusetts liquor law, the texas abortion law delegates quintessentially governmental power to private parties. but this time it s a state delegating authority to, as he puts it, quote, literally anyone
get a multitude, multiple of whatever bounties are being claimed against them so that what we need, since this texas law operates by chilling abortion helpers and abortion providers, frightening them out of business, what they can do is say, you sue us for $10,000 or 10 million, because there is no limit put on the statute, and we ll sue you for double that. do you want to try? i think a lot of the people who would waltz into court and exercise this impermissibly delegated power over abortion will think twice several times. interestingly, the point about the grendel s den case and all of this talk about private power, is that even a justice who doesn t believe in roe v.