The constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Updated)
on Aug 1, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Last week the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian legal group, filed a petition for certiorari in which it asked the Court to review a Sixth Circuit decision, which rejected the group’s claim that a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014 is unconstitutional. With similar challenges currently pending in the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits, it seems likely that the Court will take up the constitutionality of the Act at some point in the future perhaps even during the upcoming Term. During the next two weeks, SCOTUSblog will host an online symposium on the Act and the Court: when and whether the Court is likely to review the Act, and how it might rule if it does. As with last month’s online symposium on Arizona’s immigration law, we have sought contributors with a variety of viewpoints, and we would like to express our appreciation to them for sharing their views with our readers and with us.
Those contributors are:
Jonathan Adler, Case Western Reserve University School of Law
Cory Andrews, Washington Legal Foundation
Erwin Chemerinsky, University of California – Irvine School of Law
Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School
Charles Fried, Harvard Law School
Abbe R. Gluck and Gillian Metzger, Columbia Law School
Mark Hall, Wake Forest University School of Law
Dawn Johnsen, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Bradley Joondeph, Santa Clara University School of Law
Orin Kerr, The George Washington University Law School
David Kopel, Independence Institute
John Kroger, Attorney General of Oregon
Robert Levy, Cato Institute
Stephen Presser, Northwestern University
Elizabeth Price Foley, Florida International University College of Law
David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, Baker Hostetler
Robert Schapiro, Emory University School of Law
Steven Schwinn, John Marshall Law School
Ilya Shapiro, Cato Institute
Neil S. Siegel, Duke Law School
Ilya Somin, George Mason University School of Law
Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School
Adam Winkler, University of California Los Angeles School of Law
Elizabeth Wydra, Constitutional Accountability Center
Next week we will feature responses to the posts published this week. All posts will be available as they are published on our homepage. To view all of the posts in the series at once, select “Special Features” from our dropdown menu at the top of the page, and select The Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
This is the second in our summer series of online symposia. In addition to our series on Arizona v. United States, which ran last month, we also plan to host symposia on the battle over the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, as well as the impact of recent class action and arbitration decisions at the Court.
