Controversial Researcher Driven from Campus at Old Dominion University

Professor Allyn Walker was a sociologist at Old Dominion University. Walker’s research included “minor attracted individuals,” which was the topic of Walker’s new book recently published by a well-respected university press. When Walker’s research came to public attention, it generated immediate controversy, including threats against Walker and the campus and calls for Walker’s immediate termination. The university initially defended its commitment to academic freedom, but soon placed Walker on administrative leave. Walker has now resigned from the faculty.

Cathy Young has recently called “the Allyn Walker story is a test case for both progressives and conservatives,” and she’s right. Old Dominion seems to have failed its test.

When Walker was suspended, the Academic Freedom Alliance warned Old Dominion University that it was caving under pressure and sending a chilling message to every member of the faculty who might be engaged in controversial research. Unfortunately, the university continued down that path and allowed the mob to drive a professor from the campus. Although the Walker case has now been resolved with the professor’s departure from campus, the issues raised by the controversy remain all too relevant.

The AFA has now released publicly the letter that it sent to the administration of ODU. As always, the AFA is not concerned with the substance or merits of a professor’s work or ideas but with the principle that universities should be places that tolerate controversial ideas and that allow free inquiry and debate, not public opinion or political pressure, to separate error from truth. Universities should not allow threats and intimidation to short-circuit that process of critical inquiry and should not allow ideas to be suppressed and scholars defenestrated simply because they are perceived to be heretical or even dangerous.

From the letter:

It cannot be consistent with academic freedom for a university to cave in to hostile reaction on and off campus to a professor’s scholarly work. The fact that students or members of the public might be offended or disturbed by a professor’s research agenda, arguments or terminology is no basis for sanctioning the professor. The fact that they might express their outrage by making threats to the professor or to the campus only heightens the responsibility of the university to ensure that the professor is capable of continuing to perform their academic duties unmolested. For a university to validate such a “heckler’s veto” by suspending rather than protecting the faculty member will only encourage such campaigns of threats and intimidation. There are far more appropriate steps for a university to take in response to credible threats of violence or disruption that would be compatible with rather than contrary to academic freedom and the university has a responsibility to take such steps.

. . .

There is no doubt that the questions being examined by Professor Walker are important ones. Academia should be a place where such difficult questions can be boldly and honestly investigated. If a scholar’s analysis is mistaken, then it should be rebutted or ignored. But the scholar should not be driven from campus for daring to ask such difficult questions or for reaching the wrong or unpopular answers.

Read the whole thing here.

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A “Witch Hunt” at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Nearly a year ago, University of Illinois at Chicago law professor Jason Kilborn came under criticism from students, administrators and colleagues for including a hypothetical on his civil procedure exam involving an individual telling an investigating lawyer that former co-workers “expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a “n____” and “b____” (profane expressions for African Americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her.” Once complaints surfaced, Kilborn apologized but the controversy and allegations only grew. Students eventually brought in Jesse Jackson to bolster their demands that Kilborn be fired. Kilborn was suspended and investigated. He eventually reached a settlement with the university that would allow him to return to his teaching duties, but the university has subsequently reneged on that agreement. It continues to single him out for opprobrium, discipline, and reeducation. The chancellor of UIC has now dug in his heels on the matter. Northwestern University law professor Andy Koppelman has written about this case from the beginning and has appropriately decried the university’s actions as a “witch hunt.”

The Academic Freedom Alliance has released the letter that it sent to law school dean at UIC. From the letter:

For the University of Illinois at Chicago to retaliate against and sanction Professor Kilborn for constitutionally and contractually protected classroom speech would be a grave violation of academic freedom. The Academic Freedom Alliance stands firmly behind Professor Kilborn in this matter, calls on the University of Illinois at Chicago to adhere to its academic freedom principles and to abandon any conditions on his full return to his academic duties, and to publicly and emphatically reaffirm that professors at the university are free to conduct classroom discussions and to draft class exams that engage relevant but controversial language and materials.

Read the whole thing here.

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One of the Country’s Last Eviction Moratoriums Is Struck Down


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Boston politicians are fighting to retain one of the country’s last remaining eviction bans in the face of a waning pandemic and an adverse court ruling. Newly elected Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has vowed to contest a state judge’s ruling, which found that the city’s moratorium was an abuse of its emergency powers.

“We need more protections for renters in Boston,” declared Wu in a statement. “Our focus remains on protecting tenants from displacement during the COVID emergency, and connecting our residents to City and State rental relief programs.”

In August, the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) issued a sweeping ban on evicting almost any Boston resident for non-payment of rent. Only tenants who had been found by a judge to have violated their lease terms in a way that impaired the health and safety of other building tenants and neighbors could be removed under the order.

The city’s moratorium was issued just a few days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal eviction ban that had been issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A Massachusetts ban on evictions, imposed by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, was allowed to expire in October.

Boston’s moratorium immediately proved controversial. Landlord groups argued it was a usurpation of the state’s powers to regulate housing and landlord-tenant matters. Even some housing activists, while supportive of the policy, worried that it would be vulnerable to legal challenges.

A landlord and a constable eventually sued.

BPHC argued in response to their lawsuit that its own eviction moratorium was necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and was therefore justified by state public health laws that gave it the power to craft “reasonable public health regulations” to combat communicable diseases.

In a Monday decision, Housing Court Judge Irene Bagdoian firmly rejected this argument, saying that nothing in the statutes cited by BPHC would suggest that an eviction moratorium that overrides state landlord-tenant law was “reasonable.”

“This court perceives great mischief in allowing a municipality or one of its agencies to exceed its powers,” wrote Bagdoian. She notes that the same logic employed by Boston to defend its moratorium would allow another city to use COVID-19 as a justification for opting out of state laws that force cities to allow for denser housing.

Almost every state and many localities imposed some kind of moratorium on evictions during the pandemic. Most of these have since been repealed, allowed to expire, or significantly weakened as the pandemic has waned, and billions of dollars in federal rental assistance have been made available to tenants in arrears.

Boston’s sweeping ban was one of the last of its kind.

It’s also one of the few local moratoriums to be successfully challenged in court. Judges have generally given local and state governments wide latitude to impose whatever limits on evictions they see fit during the pandemic.

These moratoriums have been justified as necessary to prevent a “wave” of evictions during the pandemic. That fear was always overblown, and wave has failed to materialize almost anywhere eviction bans have been allowed to lapse.

The policies have, however, put an incredible amount of hardship on a limited number of landlords, who have effectively been forced to provide free housing for unscrupulous, and in a few cases dangerous, tenants.

It is well past time to lift these extraordinary limits on property rights.


COVID-19

The Biden administration is reportedly following up on the limited travel restrictions it imposed on Monday with a plan to require all people entering the U.S. to be tested for COVID-19 and to self-quarantine. The Washington Post reports:

As part of an enhanced winter covid strategy Biden is expected to announce Thursday, U.S. officials would require everyone entering the country to be tested one day before boarding flights, regardless of their vaccination status or country of departure. Administration officials are also considering a requirement that all travelers get retested within three to five days of arrival.

In addition, they are debating a controversial proposal to require all travelers, including U.S. citizens, to self-quarantine for seven days, even if their test results are negative. Those who flout the requirements might be subject to fines and penalties, the first time such penalties would be linked to testing and quarantine measures for travelers in the United States.

The initial travel restrictions announced by the Biden administration in response to the new omicron variant prohibited people who were neither American citizens nor permanent residents from traveling to the U.S. from several African nations.


FREE MARKETS

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says it’s probably time to stop describing the ongoing inflation as “transitory.” Asked by Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.) at a Senate hearing how long the current 6 percent inflation rate would persist, and whether it was right to continue calling it transitory, Powell said the term was confusing people who thought the word meant something closer to its dictionary definition.

Reports the New York Post:

Powell explained that while the word has “different meanings to different people,” the Federal Reserve “tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation.

“I think it’s—it’s probably a good time to retire that word and try to explain more clearly what we mean,” Powell added.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said in response that “the current annual rate of 6% is already permanent in the sense that the inflation of the last year is built in and prices won’t fall to erase it. Transitory or permanent, we’d prefer that Mr. Powell act to stop it.”


QUICK HITS

  • It’s Reason‘s annual webathon this week! Please consider supporting all the free content we provide in support of free minds and free markets.
  • BioTech CEO Ugur Sahin told Reuters the COVID-19 vaccine his company developed with Pfizer should still offer robust protection against severe disease. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel had said yesterday that there would be a “material drop” in the effectiveness of his company’s COVID-19 vaccine.
  • A D.C. assistant principal was apparently moonlighting as a full-time principal at a school in Rhode Island, reports DCist. What a commute!
  • Sloths are having trouble adjusting to the face-paced hustle and bustle of urban life. CityLab reports on a Costa Rica nonprofit that’s trying to help them adapt.
  • GOP lawmakers are plotting a federal government shutdown over President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for private employers, according to Politico.
  • A new lead emerges in the investigation into how live ammunition got onto the set of the movie Rust, where actor Alec Baldwin accidentally shot two crew members, one fatally.

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Own a Piece of Reason History


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Established in 1968, Reason has a long history of discovering, inventing, and championing the future. We were the first serious magazine to champion outlandish, seemingly insane policies such as drug legalization and equal rights for gays and lesbians half a century ago when more conventional rags like National Review and The New Republic were locked in twilight struggles over threats posed by long hair and rock music. We were early adopters to the web (circa 1995) and we published the first-ever mass-individualized magazine that sent unique covers and content to 40,000-plus subscribers. In 2007, we launched our award-winning video platform that has gone on to pull 234 million views at YouTube alone (and millions more at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). If some aspects of Termination Shock, the wonderful new Neal Stephenson novel about geoengineering, sound familiar, you may have read about them here in 1997.

At Reason, we don’t fear the future, we celebrate it—and want to help guide its development by exploring what policies, technologies, mindsets, and temperaments are best suited to prosper in the creative destruction that is an essential part of a vibrant, innovative, and forward-facing world.

And that brings me to a fun new thing we’re doing as part of our annual webathon, the one week a year where we ask our kind, gentle, generous, and so-goddamn-beautiful-it-hurts-my-eyes readers of this website to help cover the costs of producing great articles, videos, and podcasts. If you make a tax-deductible donation of $50, you get a temporary Reason tattoo and to see your name in the banner ad celebrating our supporters. At $100, you get that, plus a digital subscription (with access to 50-plus years of archives) and optional Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram shout-outs. At $500, you get all that, plus a 2021 Reason calendar and a signed copy of Robby Soave’s Tech Panic. For $1,000, you get even more, including lunch in D.C. with an editor. Go here to see all the different giving levels.

And click on the image here to check out what is surely the first non-fungible token (NFT) that is being auctioned off to support a “think magazine.”



Ted Barnett, one of the tech-savvy trustees of the nonprofit Reason Foundation that publishes Reason, is auctioning off this NFT of the regulars on The Reason Roundtable podcast (Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and me), with all of the proceeds going to fund our journalism.

If you’re new to the weird, wild, and wonderful world of NFTs, read this explainer from Reason‘s Liz Wolfe. Suffice it to say that NFTs represent a form of art and property whose provenance is perfectly unique even as it is also perfectly duplicable (suck it, Walter Benjamin!). NFTs are hot now and they may indeed turn out to be a passing fad in the art world, even as they hold promise for all sorts of other uses and stores of value.

If you win the auction for the Reason NFT #1, you get to do with it what you want, though the “smart contract” governing the object stipulates that Reason Foundation will receive 10 percent of any future purchases (pretty cool, eh?). Whatever you pay for it will go to Reason‘s coffers (though because of complicated tax laws, you will not be able to claim the cost as a tax deduction).

The auction is hosted at Open Sea, the largest NFT site, and it requires a basic understanding of the cryptocurrency Ether and the Ethereum blockchain, how crypto wallets work, and some time to work through the kinks of connecting your crypto funds, your wallet, and Open Sea. But if I—a left-handed, near-sighted, 58-year-old English major—can figure all that out, so can you. Nobody said the future would be frictionless, and Open Sea has a rich FAQs section that should help. The auction ends when the webathon does, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, December 7.

So become the first owner of the first Reason NFT and do with it what you will! Or support Reason‘s journalism—and a future of libertarian “free minds and free markets”—by more conventional, fully tax-deductible means using credit cards, PayPal, or crypto (of course). The swag is pretty great (for $5,000, you get too much stuff to list in a parenthetical!) and it’s all right here.

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Turks Flee to Gold, Bitcoin, and Foreign Currency as Government Devalues Lira


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The rising price of everything is hard to miss when you see it in the groceries, holiday gifts, and the tab at the fuel pump. Inflation isn’t just an American problem, either, with prices rising across the world or, more accurately, the purchasing power of many nations’ currencies declining. An important example is found in Turkey, where people hustle to spend or exchange paychecks denominated in the country’s lira before it loses even more of its value. At a time when officials want to squeeze out independent cryptocurrencies and even eliminate anonymous cash, it’s a chilling warning of the danger of giving governments free rein to mess with our money.

“The Turkish lira’s rapid slide—13% in one day this month and about 38% since the beginning of the year—resulted in a wave of Turks exchanging their liras for dollars, euros and other currency,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week.

The value of the currency isn’t just a curiosity for foreign-exchange traders. It represents the purchasing power of people’s paychecks, of the money storekeepers receive for their sales, and of the payments that companies take in for their goods and services.

“I had never experienced such a deplorable life. I go to sleep, I wake up and the prices have gone up. I bought a 5-litre can of (cooking) oil, it was 40 lira. I went back, it was 80 lira,” a widowed mother of two told the AP in November. “We don’t deserve this as a nation.”

Officially, inflation in Turkey is running at about 20 percent, though independent economists say it’s more than double that figure. As a result, while the lira can be used to make purchases, it no longer functions as a store of value. To put cash aside for a rainy day is to watch it deteriorate to the status of toilet paper. This isn’t Turks’ first go-round with unreliable money, which is why they long ago developed the habit of keeping part of their savings denominated in other, more-stable currencies.

“About 59% of retail bank deposits are now in foreign currencies, up from nearly 57% the week before,” The Wall Street Journal added. 

Dollars and euros aren’t the only alternatives to the lira.

“Turks have traditionally used gold as savings and there may be as much as 5,000 tonnes of it ‘under mattresses’, with more added after the recent buying spree,” Reuters reported last year even before the currency lost so much of its value.

Tellingly, even though Turkish banks accept deposits in both gold and foreign currency, many people avoid them out of fear the government might seize private funds to bail itself out.

“Smart Turks are keeping their savings at home, whether in gold or FX,” The National Interest noted earlier this year. 

Looking for a safe haven, many people also take to cryptocurrency. While volatile, independent digital currencies appear to be a better bet than a lira that loses value by the day. Bitcoin and its competitors can also be transferred over long distances and across national borders.

“The latest economic turmoil has led to a surge in cryptocurrency trading in the country, with investors hoping to gain from bitcoin’s recent rally and shelter against inflation,” reported The Guardian in April.

The Turkish government promptly banned the use of cryptocurrency in payments for goods and services, though trading continues.

The reason for the plunging lira is no secret. In contrast to virtually every economist on the planet, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that low interest rates and cheap money fuel a thriving economy that fights inflation. His claims—dubbed “insane” in some quarters—don’t seem to have done much for the value of the currency. Nevertheless, he sticks to his policy and fires officials who disagree.

Instead, what Erdogan has actually accomplished is a surging money supply that dilutes the value of the lira and has driven Turks to despair. In this, Turkey is not entirely alone, of course. While Britain, the eurozone, and the United States haven’t increased the amount of money in circulation as rapidly as Turkey, similar “stimulus” efforts since the beginning of the pandemic have vastly increased dollars, euros, and pounds in circulation (measurements are in M2 since the U.S. reclassified M1 last year). As the supply of money in circulation increased, economists warned that inflation would be the result.

“This money supply growth is just so much faster than anything we’ve seen,” Desmond Lachman, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned Reuters in June. “It’s difficult for me to see how you don’t get inflation.”

Sure enough, the IMF notes in its October World Economic Outlook that “Headline inflation has risen rapidly in advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies since the beginning of 2021,” though it hopes for an improvement next year. 

Pointing to Turkey and other countries that use printing presses to pay their bills, The Economist warned last month: “As policymakers in rich and poor countries alike confront the enormous economic and budgetary costs of covid-19, some may be tempted to depart from norms around monetary and fiscal policy. The result, in some unhappy places, could be inflation that is too hot to handle.”

Fortunately, Turks have been able to preserve some of their wealth in gold, cryptocurrency, and less-unstable foreign currencies. These alternative stores of value provide safe havens from irresponsible government policies that make the lira unreliable. But, as demonstrated by the Turkish government’s restrictions on crypto, officials don’t like it when people flee their controls and put their wealth beyond reach. Governments around the world talk about replacing bitcoin with government-controlled digital currencies, and even eliminating traditional cash and coins to bring economies under greater central monitoring and management.

Eliminating alternatives to government-controlled currency was always a frightening idea to anybody who cares about freedom and privacy. The plight of Turkey’s savers, shoppers, and businesses shows that such a move, if successfully implemented, could also impoverish us all.

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China’s War on Crypto


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In El Salvador, you can now use crypto-currency to pay for your Big Mac. In Kazakhstan and Russia, crypto mining operations have taken off. In China, however, the Communist Party is bent on destroying every form of cryptocurrency except a still-to-be-developed digital yuan that isn’t really a cryptocurrency at all.

The Chinese government has spent years enacting regulations designed to thwart the enthusiastic adoption of cryptocurrency on the mainland. But a new regulatory action announced on September 15 is different, says Karman Lucero, a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, because its language is “somewhat scarily broad.”

The regulatory notice promised to shut down both cryptocurrency mining—a process through which computers around the world maintain and secure the network—and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges. Domestic exchanges have been illegal in China since 2017, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long indicated its hostility to crypto. So it’s not exactly shocking that the government is getting more aggressive. But the new rule’s language is vague and hard to parse.

“One reason this is potentially different,” Lucero says, “is the actors that are involved in this most recent crackdown language.” The new regulations will be enforced by “the most powerful regulators with the most clout,” who “can force people to change their behavior or lock them up for violating certain rules.” The Ministry of Public Security is mentioned multiple times, Lucero says, and so is the term public order, “one of those typical clauses you’ll see in Chinese law” that “gives the government a good amount of leeway to come in and enforce the law in whatever way suits their interests.”

Years ago, China had a thriving mining scene, measured via the global hash rate, which conveys the computing power used to extract cryptocurrency. As crypto’s liberatory potential was being realized around the world, an estimated 60 percent to 70 percent of global cryptocurrency was produced in China each year from 2017 to early 2020.

Now China sees the value in a digital currency, but only if the CCP has full control of it: The new regulations allow for a CCP-issued digital yuan, currently in development, that would “give Beijing power to track spending in real time,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Instead of the privacy promised by bitcoin and smaller, more radically anonymous cryptocurrencies, a digital yuan would empower China’s authoritarian regime to surveil transaction amounts, senders, and recipients.

Some international observers have suggested that the clampdown is due to the high energy cost of crypto undermining China’s ambitious clean energy goals. But controlling markets was a CCP priority long before the party cared about China’s carbon footprint.

The government is also working to stifle Big Tech companies by targeting them with strict privacy laws ostensibly designed to protect consumer data from private firms (but not from state agents) and piling new regulations on ride-sharing and messaging platforms. Late last year, the Chinese state sabotaged the initial public offering of Ant Group, a finance giant helmed by Jack Ma, China’s equivalent of a Silicon Valley billionaire.

China’s grand plan remains shrouded in secrecy. But it appears to be driven by the CCP’s insatiable appetite for control over the economy and its insistence that government policy should determine private investment. As it has made clear time and again over many decades, the party is hostile to sharing power, even if—perhaps especially if—Chinese consumers find the proposition appealing.

In contrast, America should be a place where these technologies can thrive. Unfortunately, many American politicians are mimicking the CCP on crypto and on tech industry oversight more broadly. President Joe Biden wants to appoint crypto foe Saule Omarova as currency comptroller, and new Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has promised to increase crypto oversight while simultaneously claiming the technology has little “long-term viability.”

Good crypto policy is not quite as simple as “do the opposite of China.” But it’s also not a whole lot more complicated than that.

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Brickbat: Party Poopers


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The Santa Cruz County, California, health officer has announced that masks will be required indoors indefinitely as part of its efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Private homes are exempt from the order if only members of the household are present. But if there are people who live elsewhere inside the home, everyone must wear a mask. The order does not exempt those who are fully vaccinated.

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Can SCOTUS Draw a New Line on Abortion?


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For nearly half a century, the Supreme Court has said the Constitution prohibits states from banning abortion before “viability,” the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. Today Mississippi, defending its ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, will urge the justices to abandon that longstanding rule, which it says never made much sense and cannot be constitutionally justified.

Mississippi has a point: The viability rule does not satisfactorily resolve the competing moral claims at the heart of the abortion debate. But the same could be said of the alternatives, including whatever policies state legislators would choose should the Court decide that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion after all.

Depending on your perspective, the Court either recognized or invented that right in 1973, when it overturned a Texas law that prohibited abortion except when it was deemed necessary to save the mother’s life. Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, was initially inclined to draw a line at the end of the first trimester (about 13 weeks) but ultimately settled on “viability,” which he said “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks).”

In the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court reaffirmed Roe‘s “central holding” that “viability marks the earliest point at which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions.” It said that judgment “in no sense turns on whether viability occurs at approximately 28 weeks, as was usual at the time of Roe, at 23 to 24 weeks, as it sometimes does today, or at some moment even slightly earlier in pregnancy, as it may if fetal respiratory capacity can somehow be enhanced in the future.”

But the technologically contingent definition of viability is not the only reason to question the soundness of this distinction. Roe posited that the ability to breathe, with or without artificial assistance, marks the point at which “the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life” becomes “compelling.”

According to Roe, “this is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.” According to Casey, viability is when “there is a realistic possibility of maintaining and nourishing a life outside the womb, so that the independent existence of the second life can in reason and all fairness be the object of state protection that now overrides the rights of the woman.”

This rationale, Mississippi argues, “boils down to a circular assertion: when an unborn child can live outside the womb then the State’s interest is compelling because the unborn child can live outside the womb.” And if “independent existence” is the crucial consideration, that logic could be extended in ways that few would consider morally acceptable, since infants rely on the care of others long after birth, while disabled people may need such assistance indefinitely.

From a pro-choice perspective, the viability rule has the advantage of allowing nearly all abortions, less than 1 percent of which are performed at 21 weeks or later. But Mississippi’s 15-week limit, which would prohibit about 5 percent of abortions in that state, is not much different on that score.

Why 15 weeks? The state legislature’s choice of that limit seems no less arbitrary than the viability rule, especially since its findings suggested several other possibilities, including five to six weeks (when “an unborn human being’s heart begins beating”), eight weeks (when a fetus “begins to move about in the womb”), nine weeks (when “all basic physiological functions are present”), and 10 weeks (when “vital organs begin to function”).

There are many answers to the question of at what point on the continuum from conception to birth another person’s right to life supersedes a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, and none is completely satisfying. That will remain true no matter where the Court comes down on the government’s authority to make that call.

© Copyright 2021 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Journal of Free Speech Law Panel on Regulating Social Media Platforms Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11 am Pacific

UCLA’s Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy and the University of Arizona’s TechLaw Program are hosting a set of virtual public conversations between the Journal of Free Speech Law authors and executive editors. Tomorrow (Wednesday), we will discuss essays by Mark Lemley, Jack Balkin, and Daphne Keller about the unintended consequences and practical limitations of proposals to regulate social media platforms:

Watch at this Zoom link, from 11 am Pacific to noon. You can also watch the previous conversations in the same symposium:

[1.] Chris Yoo, Ash Bhagwat, and me, moderated by Jane Bambauer:

[2.] Eric Goldman and Jess Miers, moderated by Ash Bhagwat.

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