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 on earth with an objection to abortion, giving that individual or organization the unilateral and unfettered power to inflict punishment on whoever assists a woman in terminating a pregnancy. lawrence tribe said that supreme court precedent he pursued and won in 1982, the way he won that case for that bar in cambridge can be the undoing of the texas now, how exactly it has to go for that strategy to work, who has to bring the lawsuit and when and against whom, that itself is obviously very important to this as a strategy. logically it s also really interesting even to those of us who aren t lawyers. we re going to speak to lawrence tribe about that in just a
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
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
our constitutional rights. i think there is some appeal or some i don t know, some easiness to the idea that the justice department could swoop in here and sort of save this constitutional right, that the government, the administration, could move in to act. but one of the ways you re describing the vulnerability of this law would involve bringing lawsuits by people who effectively were targeted by this texas law, and that would be handled as a civil matter? well, the individuals who were targeted, then the clinics that are taken out of business could bring lawsuits under the civil equivalent of the ku klux klan act, which is 42 u.s. code sections 1983 and 1985. those are the sections they could bring suits to basically 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
though, watching all those developments was a bit of a bull from the blue to get today s news from across texas other state line. from across texas border to the south. because today the supreme court of mexico ruled that it is unconstitutional to ban abortion any longer in that country. some states in mexico allow for legal abortion, some do not, but the supreme court ruling today in mexico struck down one state s abortion ban, and the ruling is expected to be binding on all states in the country. in other words, mexico just got its roe v. wade today, just a few days after the republican-appointed majority on our supreme court got rid of the protections of roe in the united states of america. it s like our two countries passed each other at the threshold, right? one country leaving the century going backwards, the other one on its way in. nobody is quite sure what the