Three generations, no imbeciles: new light on Buck v. Bell.

Jacobson v Massachusetts, a 1905 US Supreme Court decision, raised questions about the power of state government to protect the public's health and the Constitution's protection of personal liberty. We examined conceptions about state power and personal liberty in Jacobson and later cases that expanded, superseded, or even ignored those ideas. Public health and constitutional law have evolved to better protect both health and human rights. States' sovereign power to make laws of all kinds has not changed in the past century. What has changed is the Court's recognition of the importance of individual liberty and how it limits that power. Preserving the public's health in the 21st century requires preserving respect for personal liberty.

The objective of this article is to find middle ground between the supporters and opponents of biotechnology by perpetuating the existing legal compromise pertaining to the complete range of health and welfare doctrines relevant to the biotechnological industry. The author aspires neither to add to nor detract from this liberal democratic consensus, but to preserve its constitutive balance between positivism and natural law and over-regulation and under-regulation in the hopes of stabilizing new political fault lines developing around the few biotechnological innovations already grabbing headlines. The most feasible solution is to extend the existing liberal democratic compromise with respect to equal protection, reproductive rights, the First Amendment, human subject experimentation, patent law, and parental rights. This includes banning or monopolizing certain biotechnologies and extending substantive special respect to the ex vivo living human embryo. Biotechnology must not be left to regulate itself.

Birth and death: doctor control vs. patient choice.

Eugenics was defined by Galton as 'the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race'. In Peru, eugenics was related to social medicine and mental hygiene, in accordance with the neo-Lamarckian orientation, that predominated in Latin America. Peruvian eugenists assumed the mission of fighting hereditary and infectious diseases, malnutrition, alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, criminality and everything that threatened the future of the 'Peruvian race'. There were some enthusiastic advocates of 'hard' eugenic measures, such as forced sterilization and eugenic abortion, but these were never officially implemented in Peru (except for the compulsory sterilization campaign during the 1995-2000 period). Eugenics dominated scientific discourse during the first half of the twentieth century, but eugenic discourse did not disappear completely until the 1970s.

Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy

Protecting parents' freedom to have children with genetic differences.

This Note discusses the recent controversy surrounding a six-year-old girl named Ashley, whose parents chose to purposefully stunt her growth and remove her reproductive organs for nonmedical reasons. A federal investigation determined that Ashley's rights had been violated because doctors performed the procedure, now referred to as the "Ashley Treatment," without first obtaining a court order. However, the investigation did not make any conclusions regarding whether the "Ashley Treatment" could present a legally permissible treatment option in the future. After discussing the constitutional rights that the "Ashley Treatment" implicates and the current legal standards in place, this Note examines how courts have applied these legal standards to cases involving extreme requests. Drawing upon legal commentators, this Note concludes that a court could approve a request for the "Ashley Treatment" in appropriate and limited cases where the parents have presented clear and convincing evidence before a court that the benefits that the "Ashley Treatment" would provide to the child and her family outweigh the risks associated with the procedure. This Note argues that those benefits may include extrinsic considerations, but courts should remain cautious when considering such evidence and be sure that the evidence as a whole supports their conclusions.

The Attempts to Introduce Eugenic Legislation in the Second Polish Republic as Viewed from the Perspective of the Solutions Adopted in the United States of America In the first decades of the 20th century, broad recognition of Francis Galton’s eugenics resulte

Presidential address 1999--working for justice: responsibilities for the next millennium.

In 1924, Virginia passed a law "to preserve racial integrity" as part of a wave of eugenic legislation. Debate surrounding the passage of the Racial Integrity Act, a law forbidding a white person to marry anyone of another race, reveals how eugenicists manipulated ideas about race, class, and gender to create a social crisis that apparently could only be solved through their policies. Women's growing independence and new social behaviors, they feared, would lead to increasing sexual relations between white women and black men. Proponents of the act articulated a new female vulnerability, encouraged women's return to their traditional roles, and supported efforts to control women who did not conform to moral expectations. Justified by eugenicists' desire to protect and improve white genetic stock, and ostensibly enacted to prevent racial mixture, the law ultimately served to prescribe the attitudes and behavior of Virginia's white women.