The National Civil Justice Institute has an exciting event coming up in Dallas, TX on March 31-April 1: our next Academic Symposium, cosponsored with SMU Dedman School of Law. The topic will be The Future of Substantive Due Process: What Are the Stakes? The symposium is open to attorneys, judges and law clerks, law professors and students, and nonprofits. Interested parties may register to attend in person in Dallas or via livestream.
Today, constitutional rights that have until very recently been treated as matters of settled law are under serious threat. Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al., 142 S. Ct. 2228, 2301-02 (2022) (which overruled Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)), ominously wrote that, “in future cases, we should reconsider all of [the U.S. Supreme] Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ . . . we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents. . . . After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.” (Emphasis added.)
We are proud that a distinguished faculty of 15 academics, three judges, and four attorneys will address the current state and future of substantive due process (SDP) in terms of core issues, enforcement of rights, and impacts on everyday life. Eleven new papers will be presented on topics ranging from the history of the SDP doctrine, to rights such as free movement, academic freedom, and end-of-life care, to the role of state courts and constitutions in protecting SDP rights, to secrecy and transparency in SDP litigation. We are honored to have Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley School of Law as the conference keynote speaker.
More details on faculty, paper topics, and logistics at https://ncji.org/the-future-of-substantive-due-process/.