Week Five: Civil Liberties and Public Health
Our seventh series focuses on the US Supreme Court and civil liberties. This week, we use two short videos to explore a question that could well reach the Court this term – the constitutionality of vaccine mandates.
The first video considers the American tradition of individualism and how it complicates the adoption of good public health practice in times of pandemic. The second focuses on the case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), that currently most directly addresses the question of whether vaccine mandates can be constitutional. This week, both videos come from C-SPAN Classroom.
The first video features Yale Professor of law and history John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 (Yale, 2020) and Georgetown University Law Professor and Director of the Institute for National and Global Health Law Lawrence Gostin. Their conversation about America's culture of individualism and its clash with the common good when it comes to public health runs a little less than 3 minutes.
In the second video, Peter Canellos, Politico editor-at-large and the author of The Great Dissenter, talks about about the legacy of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky. In this video, however, Canellos focused on one of the cases in which Harlan was not only in, but writing for, the Court’s majority -- Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) which was a simple case with lasting impact. Massachusetts law allowed cities to require residents be vaccinated against smallpox. Cambridge adopted such an ordinance. Jacobson, a resident of Cambridge, refused to comply and was fined $5. He appealed and the case ultimately reached the Supreme Court where it produced the decision that, to this day, most directly addresses the constitutionality of vaccine mandates.
The video at the link below runs 3:30 minutes.
