Volume 106

Substance-Targeted Choice-of-Law Clauses

Recent cases highlight two persistent problems in United States litigation: the frequency with which parties seek to validate an otherwise unenforceable provision through a choice-of-law clause, and the disparate results courts have reached in such cases. These problems, while not wholly new, have recently become more troublesome and widespread. Courts, however, have not grown more consistent in their approach to them. On the contrary, they increasingly reach varied results on highly similar facts, resulting in endless legal uncertainty, forum shopping, and doubts about judicial impartiality. These effects are all the more problematic because, as most conflicts scholars would agree, parties should not be allowed to choose a jurisdiction’s law solely for the purpose of validating a contested contractual provision; indeed, permitting them to do so is at odds with most purposes of contractual choice-of-law enforcement.

For this reason, this Article proposes that, rather than fall back on complicated public policy exceptions to contractual choice of law, courts should instead identify and refuse to apply choice-of-law clauses that are adopted for the purpose of making a separate contractual provision enforceable. This Article refers to such clauses as “substance-targeted.” Courts typically do not distinguish between targeted and non-targeted choice-of-law clauses. As a result, targeted clauses are often treated as if they represent an ordinary instance of allowing contracting parties the autonomy to choose the law applicable to their dispute. Yet they involve meaningfully different considerations, both because of the reasons that parties choose to include them and because of their ultimate effects. Unlike conventional choice-of-law clauses, substance-targeted clauses are neither aimed at achieving predictability nor likely to result in it. Their frequent use encourages litigation, disadvantages weaker parties, and fosters fear about results-oriented reasoning when their enforceability is tested. These pernicious effects call for a fundamentally different approach to choice-of-law analyses.

Introduction

On October 24, 2001, Christopher Ridgeway, a resident of Louisiana, accepted a job with Michigan-based Stryker Corporation selling medical supplies to Louisiana doctors and hospitals.1 1.See Stone Surgical, LLC v. Stryker Corp., 858 F.3d 383, 386 (6th Cir. 2017).Show More The offer was conditional on Ridgeway’s signing several documents, among them a noncompete agreement that included Michigan choice-of-law and forum selection clauses.2 2.Ridgeway initially disputed the authenticity of the noncompete agreement, but evidence produced in discovery suggested that Ridgeway had received a form noncompete identical to 132 others Stryker had signed with its employees over a five-year period. Id. at 387–88. A jury later found that Ridgeway had signed the noncompete.Id.at 388.Show More Ridgeway went on to become a highly successful salesman for Stryker,3 3.Id. at 386.Show More during which time, according to him, Stryker’s human resource director and other top management assured him on several occasions that no “[noncompete] agreement existed in his file.”4 4.Id. Stryker unsurprisingly disputed Ridgeway’s view of these conversations, maintaining that they related instead to whether Ridgeway had signed a second noncompete that would enable him to receive stock options. Id. at 387.Show More Based on these assurances, Ridgeway maintains, he began in 2013 to explore employment with a competitor, Biomet.5 5.Id. at 386.Show More Stryker learned of these discussions and immediately fired Ridgeway, who then began working for Biomet in Louisiana.6 6.Id. at 387.Show More A few weeks later, Stryker filed suit against Ridgeway in federal court in Michigan.7 7.Ridgeway was fired on September 10, 2013; Stryker filed suit on September 30, 2013. See Complaint for Injunctive and Other Relief at 4, 34, Stryker Corp. v. Ridgeway, No. 1:13-cv-01066 (W.D. Mich. Sept. 30, 2013), 2013 WL 5526657.Show More

Stryker’s claims—for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and misappropriation of trade secrets—all directly or indirectly involved the noncompete agreement Ridgeway had signed.8 8.See Amended Complaint at 1–2, Stryker Corp. v. Ridgeway, No. 1:13-cv-01066 (W.D. Mich. Oct. 21, 2013), 2013 WL 11276336.Show More The enforceability of noncompetes is a point on which state law differs substantially; in this case, the court noted, “Michigan law favors non-competes and Louisiana law severely restricts them.”9 9.See Stone Surgical, 858 F.3d at 391.Show More There is more consensus on contractual choice-of-law provisions, such as the one in Ridgeway’s contract. Choice-of-law provisions are generally enforced in the United States, with most states recognizing an exception when the chosen law would violate a “fundamental policy” of the state with both the “most significant relationship” to the dispute and a “materially greater interest” in the issue.10 10.See Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws §§ 187(2), 188(1) (Am. Law Inst. 1971) [hereinafter Second Restatement].Show More Ridgeway argued that the exception should be applied, but both the district court and the Sixth Circuit disagreed. The Sixth Circuit, while finding both that Louisiana indeed had the most significant relationship to the dispute and that its anti-noncompete policy was “fundamental,” nonetheless concluded that Louisiana’s interest was not “materially greater” than Michigan’s.11 11.Stone Surgical, 858 F.3d at 391.Show More Therefore, Michigan law applied and the noncompete was valid.12 12.Id.Show More

The lawsuit ended badly for Ridgeway. The jury entered a verdict of $745,195 for Stryker.13 13.Id. at 388. The jury also denied relief to Ridgeway in his counterclaims against Stryker, which he originally filed in a separate proceeding but were ultimately consolidated with Stryker’s action. Id.Show More Biomet, fearful of being drawn into the litigation, had terminated Ridgeway’s employment shortly after Stryker’s lawsuit was filed.14 14.Id. at 387.Show More In March 2016, Ridgeway filed for bankruptcy.15 15.See Voluntary Petition for Individuals Filing for Bankruptcy, In re Christopher Martin Ridgeway, No. 16-10643 (Bankr. E.D. La. Mar. 23, 2016).Show More

As Ridgeway was fighting his lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful legal battles, another employee in a dispute over noncompete enforceability was met with a very different result. In 2013, Nevada resident Landon Shores was hired as a sales trainee by Global Experience Specialists (GES), a Nevada company specializing in event marketing.16 16.Freeman Expositions, Inc. v. Glob. Experience Specialists, Inc., No. SACV 17-00364, 2017 WL 1488269, at *1 (C.D. Cal. Apr. 24, 2017).Show More The large majority of Shores’s sales for GES related to events in Las Vegas.17 17.See id. (“During Mr. Shores’ work at GES, eighty to ninety percent of his sales were for events in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the vast majority of his clients were primarily engaged in Las Vegas.” (internal quotation marks omitted)).Show More Three years later, Shores was promoted to sales manager, a position that required him to sign a noncompete agreement that included a Nevada choice-of-law clause.18 18.Id.Show More

In 2017, Shores gave notice at GES and made plans to move to California to accept a job with one of the California offices of Freeman Expositions, a Texas corporation.19 19.Id.Show More GES did not take the news well, and two GES employees made threatening calls to Shores.20 20.See id. at *2. One asked him “Do you really want to go down this road?” and explained that “[o]ne path is to remain with GES and the other path is to go with Freeman and get sued and go broke. It is a lot easier to get out of an offer letter than a non-compete agreement.” Id.Show More Undeterred, Shores began his job at Freeman, which shortly thereafter filed suit in federal court in California seeking a declaration that Shores’s noncompete clause was invalid.21 21.See id.Show More

In contrast to Ridgeway’s experiences in court, Shores and Freeman encountered a friendly reception. Nominally applying precisely the same doctrinal framework the Sixth Circuit had in Ridgeway’s case, the California district court nonetheless concluded that the Nevada choice-of-law clause was invalid22 22.See id. at *5.Show More—reaching this result despite connections between Shores’s employment and Nevada that were, one might conclude, objectively much stronger than Ridgeway’s with Michigan.23 23.Ridgeway, after all, had left a Louisiana-based sales job for another employer in Louisiana; his only contact with Michigan was that his former employer was headquartered there. See Stone Surgical, LLC v. Stryker Corp., 858 F.3d 383, 386–87, 390 (6th Cir. 2017). By contrast, Shores had lived and worked in Nevada prior to beginning employment with Freeman. See Freeman Expositions, 2017 WL 1488269, at *1.Show More In Shores’s case, the court had little difficulty making the determination that California had a materially greater interest in having its well-established anti-noncompete policy applied.24 24.See Freeman Expositions, 2017 WL 1488269, at *5.Show More California had a stake, the court reasoned, in allowing an employer “to hire a California resident to work in California organizing and facilitating exhibitions to showcase California goods and services.”25 25.Id. at *5.Show More While Nevada, too, had a significant interest in protecting its employer, GES, “its interest pale[d] in comparison to California’s.”26 26.Id.Show More The court declined to stay proceedings in light of an ongoing Nevada court action and instead granted Freeman summary judgment on the noncompete issue.27 27.See id. at *1, *3. The court also declined to dismiss a claim by Freeman for interference with its contractual relationship with Shores. See id. at *8.Show More

These two recent cases highlight two persistent problems in United States litigation: the frequency with which parties attempt to use a choice-of-law clause to validate an otherwise unenforceable provision, and the disparate results courts have reached in such cases. These issues are not wholly new.28 28.As early as 1993, one commentator observed that the issue of choice-of-law enforcement in difficult cases “has generated a raft of judicial decisions marked by confusion, temerity, and vacillation.” Kirt O’Neill, Note, Contractual Choice of Law: The Case for a New Determination of Full Faith and Credit Limitations, 71 Tex. L. Rev. 1019, 1020 (1993).Show More In the realm of noncompetes in particular, employers have attached choice-of-law provisions for decades, despite the fact that the enforceability of such clauses (and thus the noncompete as a whole) is often in doubt.29 29.See Catherine L. Fisk, Reflections on The New Psychological Contract and the Ownership of Human Capital, 34 Conn. L. Rev. 765, 782–83 (2002).Show More Nonetheless, both these problems have recently become more persistent and widespread.30 30.See Larry E. Ribstein, From Efficiency to Politics in Contractual Choice of Law, 37 Ga. L. Rev. 363, 367 (2003) [hereinafter Ribstein, Efficiency] (noting that “the number of cases involving contractual choice is increasing significantly over time”).Show More This is true in part because, with the growing popularity of telecommuting and other sorts of long-distance employment, many disputes over noncompetes affect multiple jurisdictions and thus are likely to require a more extended and complex choice-of-law analysis.31 31.See Norman D. Bishara & David Orozco, Using the Resource-Based Theory To Determine Covenant Not To Compete Legitimacy, 87 Ind. L.J. 979, 980, 984–85 (2012) (discussing the need to adapt the law governing noncompetes in a world where a “trend toward the greater use of noncompetes is occurring when . . . geographic boundaries are becoming less important to economic activity”); Gillian Lester & Elizabeth Ryan, Choice of Law and Employee Restrictive Covenants: An American Perspective, 31 Comp. Lab. L. & Pol’y J. 389, 389 (2010) (noting that more mobile employees and more geographically dispersed employers have contributed to a rise in noncompete litigation).Show More Further, noncompetes are spreading to industries that have not historically relied on them, with hair stylists,32 32.See Steven Greenhouse, Noncompete Clauses Increasingly Pop Up in Array of Jobs, N.Y. Times (June 8, 2014), https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/­business/­noncompete-clauses-increasingly-pop-up-in-array-of-jobs.html?r=0 [https://perma.cc/4KQY-H9PV].Show More camp counselors,33 33.See id.Show More dog walkers,34 34.See Matt O’Brien, Even Janitors Have Noncompetes Now. Nobody Is Safe., Wash. Post. (Oct. 18, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/­18/even-janitors-have-noncompetes-now-nobody-is-safe/?utm_term=.c316c5c­61­487 [https://perma.cc/W7FU-S6M6].Show More and janitors35 35.See id.Show More sometimes being required to sign them—and facing suit by their employer if they violate them.36 36.See id. (describing suit by employer against janitor that was dropped following media coverage).Show More Moreover, employers are increasingly relying on alternatives to noncompetes, such as clauses requiring employees to pay back a portion of their salary or other financial benefits upon quitting or being fired for cause.37 37.See Stuart Lichten & Eric M. Fink, “Just When I Thought I Was Out . . . .”: Post-Employment Repayment Obligations, 25 Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc. Just. 51, 54 (2018) (describing growth of such provisions’ popularity). These arrangements have recently attracted national publicity for, among other things, the threat they may pose to journalistic independence. See id. at 54–55. Many Sinclair Broadcasting employees, for example, chose to read “politically charged” statements on air, despite their personal reservations, because of worries about triggering repayment clauses in their contracts. Id. The statements were described as “prepackaged reports reflecting conservative views.” Id. at 54 n.15 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).Show More As one might expect, state law varies significantly on the enforceability of these provisions as well,38 38.See id. at 68–69, 77–78 (noting differences in particular between the law of California and of other states on the enforceability of post-employment repayment obligations).Show More and employers thus have incentives to couple them with choice-of-law clauses.39 39.It is difficult to assess exactly how common choice-of-law clauses are in such agreements because employment contracts are often between private parties. See Norman D. Bishara, Kenneth J. Martin & Randall S. Thomas, An Empirical Analysis of Noncompetition Clauses and Other Restrictive Postemployment Covenants, 68 Vand. L. Rev. 1, 7 (2015). However, it is reasonable to speculate that employers frequently include such provisions, given their popularity in the noncompete context and the uncertainty of the law in this area. For an example of one such case, see Willis Re Inc. v. Hearn, 200 F. Supp. 3d 540, 545–47 (E.D. Pa. 2016) (discussing contractual choice-of-law clause in dispute involving repayment of a retention bonus following employee’s departure for a competitor).Show More

Employment contracts, however, are just the start. Contracting parties in many other areas have similarly attempted to rely on choice-of-law clauses to secure a validating law, and courts have also met those efforts with varying responses. For example, while the use of choice-of-law clauses to sidestep usury laws initially met with increasingly widespread judicial acceptance in most jurisdictions,40 40.See Erin Ann O’Hara, Opting Out of Regulation: A Public Choice Analysis of Contractual Choice of Law, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1551, 1563–64 (2000) [hereinafter O’Hara, Opting] (noting that, in contrast to the approach of the First Restatement, courts have transitioned to “almost uniformly enforc[ing] choice-of-law provisions that enable the parties to evade state usury laws”). The Second Restatement likely played a role in this acceptance by including a fairly liberal usury provision that operates even in the absence of a choice-of-law clause, providing that a given interest rate will not be invalidated on usury grounds if it is “permissible in a state to which the contract has a substantial relationship” and “not greatly in excess of the rate permitted by the general usury law of the state of the otherwise applicable law.” Second Restatement § 203. The “substantial relationship” requirement is fairly easily satisfied—if, for example, the applicable rate is that of the lender’s place of business or the place where the loan is to be repaid. See Robert Allen Sedler, The Contracts Provisions of the Restatement (Second): An Analysis and a Critique, 72 Colum. L. Rev. 279, 315–18 (1972).Show More courts in some recent cases have declined to enforce such provisions in usury cases where the state of the chosen law lacks the most significant relationship to the dispute.41 41.See Fleetwood Servs., LLC v. Complete Bus. Sols. Grp., 374 F. Supp. 3d 361, 372 (E.D. Pa. 2019) (finding that, despite parties’ choice of Pennsylvania law, Texas law applied because Texas had the most significant relationship to the dispute and “applying Pennsylvania law would violate a fundamental public policy of Texas, namely its antipathy to high interest rates” (internal quotation marks omitted)); Am. Equities Grp. v. Ahava Dairy Prods. Corp., No. 01 Civ.5207, 2004 WL 870260, at *7–9 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 23, 2004) (declining to enforce a choice of New Jersey law in a case involving a usury defense on the same grounds); Am. Express Travel Related Servs. Co. v. Assih, 893 N.Y.S.2d 438, 445–46 (N.Y. Civ. Ct. 2009) (declining to enforce a choice of Utah law in action to collect credit card payments based on New York’s materially greater interest and “strong public policy against interest rates which are excessive”); see also TriBar Op. Comm., Supp. Report: Opinions on Chosen-Law Provisions Under the Restatement of Conflict of Laws, 68 Bus. Law. 1161, 1161–62, 1162 n.2 (2013) (discussing analysis of this issue in New York courts and noting that it deviates somewhat from the orthodox Second Restatement approach).Show More Courts have frequently refused to enforce choice-of-law provisions in various contexts involving consumer contracts42 42.See William J. Moon, Contracting Out of Public Law, 55 Harv. J. on Legis. 323, 347 (2018) (“[C]ourts have consistently refused to enforce choice-of-law clauses in the context of . . . consumer contracts.”). In some cases, this refusal has been based on concerns about the substantive content of the chosen law. See, e.g., Masters v. DirecTV, Inc., Nos. 08-55825 & 08–55830, 2009 WL 4885132, at *1 (9th Cir. Nov. 19, 2009) (holding that California law, rather than the parties’ chosen law, applied to consumer class action waivers because such waivers were contrary to a fundamental policy in California); see also William J. Woodward Jr., Legal Uncertainty and Aberrant Contracts: The Choice of Law Clause, 89 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 197, 207–09 (2014) [hereinafter Woodward, Aberrant] (discussing case law on enforcement of choice-of-law clauses in questions regarding the applicability of state statutes that convert one-way attorney’s-fee-shifting provisions into two-way provisions). Procedural concerns about information asymmetry and bargaining power disparities in form consumer contracts may also weigh in favor of non-enforcement. See generally Giesela Rühl, Consumer Protection in Choice of Law, 44 Cornell Int’l L.J. 569 (2011) (considering these issues and advocating for European-style limits on choice of law in consumer contracts).Show More and have also often opted for non-enforcement of provisions intended to evade state franchise law protections, such as laws prohibiting waiver of a franchisee’s right to sue under certain circumstances.43 43.See Andrew Elmore, Franchise Regulation for the Fissured Economy, 86 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 907, 954 n.229 (2018) (“States prohibit choice of law provisions and waivers in franchise agreements to contract around state franchise law obligations, which will foreclose evasions of a liability through waiver.”). For example, in Wright-Moore Corp. v. Ricoh Corp., the court found that Indiana law applied, rather than the parties’ chosen law of New York, because Indiana had a materially greater interest in the dispute and waiver of a franchisee’s rights was against Indiana’s fundamental policy. 908 F.2d 128, 132–33 (7th Cir. 1990).Show More Recently, emerging issues such as the protection of privacy rights in biometric data44 44.See, e.g., In re Facebook Biometric Info. Privacy Litig., 185 F. Supp. 3d 1155, 1169–70 (N.D. Cal. 2016) (concluding that a California choice-of-law provision could not be enforced where “California has not legislatively recognized a right to privacy in personal biometric data and has not implemented any specific protections for that right” and biometric data protection was a fundamental policy in Illinois, the state of the most significant relationship).Show More and the practice of telemedicine45 45.See J. Kelly Barnes, Telemedicine: A Conflict of Laws Problem Waiting To Happen—How Will Interstate and International Claims Be Decided?, 28 Hous. J. Int’l L. 491, 526–28 (2006) (discussing potential enforceability of choice-of-law clauses in the context of telemedicine).Show More have also raised issues about choice-of-law clause enforceability.

The issue has arisen, too, in the area of marriage and family law. Many courts, for example, allow choice-of-law provisions to validate antenuptial agreements.46 46.See O’Hara, Opting, supra note 40, at 1564–65 (“Antenuptial agreements are also incorporating choice-of-law provisions with mounting, albeit tentative, judicial support.”); see also John F. Coyle, A Short History of the Choice-of-Law Clause, 91 Colo. L. Rev. 1147, 1162–63, 1162 n.42 (2020) (noting that an example of such a clause exists as far back as 1874).Show More But according to one commentator, “[t]he paucity of court decisions” in areas where potentially applicable law differs significantly continues to “create[] uncertainty for all migratory couples who sign such an agreement.”47 47.See Linda J. Ravdin, Premarital Agreements and the Migratory Same-Sex Couple, 48 Fam. L.Q. 397, 406 (2014).Show More Choice-of-law clauses present distinct but related issues in other areas where states are sharply divided, such as the circumstances (if any) under which gestational surrogacy contracts are enforceable.48 48.See, e.g., Hodas v. Morin, 814 N.E.2d 320, 325–26 (Mass. 2004) (applying Section 187 of the Second Restatement to determine that a surrogacy agreement was valid and finding that no state other than the state of the chosen law, Massachusetts, clearly had the “materially greater” relationship to the dispute). Martha A. Field summarizes the manifold approaches states take toward surrogacy contracts, including fairly broad enforcement, enforcement provided certain requirements are met, toleration without explicitly regulating the subject, and criminalizing paid surrogacy. See Martha A. Field, Compensated Surrogacy, 89 Wash. L. Rev. 1155, 1161–65 (2014). Parties to such contracts have sometimes selected the law of a state hospitable to surrogacy, clauses that courts have enforced in some cases “notwithstanding manipulated contacts with the selected state and strong anti-surrogacy policies in the gestational carrier’s domicile.” Susan Frelich Appleton, Leaving Home? Domicile, Family, and Gender, 47 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1453, 1512 (2014). Parties, however, cannot count on such a result, meaning that “the safest approach [for parties to a surrogacy contract] is to do something substantial in connection with the surrogacy arrangement in that state beyond just choosing its law.” See Joseph F. Morrissey, Surrogacy: The Process, the Law, and the Contracts, 51 Willamette L. Rev. 459, 509 (2015) (also noting that “courts may not honor the choice-of-law provision” in the absence of a substantial contact such as “using a clinic in [the] state [of the chosen law], or using an agency, surrogate or egg donor from that state”).Show More

Yet despite the proliferation of situations in which the validity of choice-of-law clauses is sharply contested, courts have not grown more consistent in their approach to them. In fact, the opposite is true; as the opening examples suggest,49 49.See supra note 23 and accompanying text.Show More courts increasingly reach disparate results on highly similar facts.50 50.See Woodward, Aberrant, supra note 42, at 208–09 (discussing the uncertainty created by the “fact-based and hopelessly uncertain” analysis under Section 187).Show More In one sense, this is surprising, given that jurisdictions in the United States have widely embraced the same authority—Section 187(2) of the Second Restatement of Conflict of Laws—to guide their approach to contractual choice of law.51 51.See infra notes 89–94 and accompanying text.Show More Notwithstanding this rare consensus on choice-of-law methodology, however, courts interpret Section 187(2) in ever-diverging, often wholly contradictory ways.52 52.See infraSubsection II.B.3.Show More This means that the enforceability of choice-of-law clauses involving controversial issues is driven by judicial reasoning that takes highly variegated approaches to seemingly similar facts and is, as a result, often impossible to predict at the time of contracting.

Courts’ inconsistent resolutions of this category of cases have created several problems. To begin with, the disparate results courts have reached on similar facts have undermined faith in the judiciary’s ability to deal with many contested areas of law in a reasoned, unbiased manner.53 53.See David A. Linehan, Due Process Denied: The Forgotten Constitutional Limits on Choice of Law in the Enforcement of Employee Covenants Not To Compete, 2012 Utah L. Rev. 209, 213 (positing that courts, rather than respecting relevant constitutional constraints, “expansively apply their own restrictive rules against noncompetes to virtually any dispute tried within their borders”).Show More Different commentators have argued in parallel, for example, that decisions refusing to honor contractual choice-of-law provisions in noncompete agreements54 54.See Timothy P. Glynn, Interjurisdictional Competition in Enforcing Non-competition Agreements: Regulatory Risk Management and the Race to the Bottom, 65 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1381, 1386–87 (2008) (describing and positing the likely future growth of a phenomenon whereby states seek to export their employer-friendly policies extraterritorially by broadly enforcing both noncompetes and choice-of-law clauses).Show More and those insisting on enforcement55 55.See Linehan, supra note 53, at 212 (arguing that courts have applied their choice-of-law principles in noncompete cases in a way that “fail[s] to respect due process constraints on their power to prefer their own laws to those of sister states”).Show More are driven by forum-law preference or other forms of state favoritism.

Moreover, even assuming that judges are applying Section 187 scrupulously and in good faith, the sheer unpredictability of results creates a host of issues in itself.56 56.See id. at 211.Show More Contracting parties are less able to negotiate effectively if the validity of a choice-of-law provision is in doubt,57 57.See, e.g., Lawrence J. La Sala, Note, Partner Bankruptcy and Partnership Dissolution: Protecting the Terms of the Contract and Ensuring Predictability, 59 Fordham L. Rev. 619, 643 n.135 (1991) (“Because parties normally will not enter into a contract if they are unable to foresee accurately their rights and liabilities under the contract, predictability is a prime objective of contract law.”).Show More and disputes are more likely to end in litigation.58 58.See Glynn, supra note 54, at 1385 (calling attention to “the rise of interjurisdictional disputes involving [noncompete] enforcement”).Show More Further, where parties have unequal bargaining power, legal uncertainty about choice-of-law provisions often unfairly disadvantages the weaker party, who might be able to successfully challenge the clause in court but may lack the resources to try.59 59.See, e.g., Woodward, Aberrant, supra note 42, at 212 (noting that “many rational clients will forego using a lawyer in a small claim or defense if they risk paying their lawyer more (probably far more) than the claim or defense is worth”).Show More Finally, the potential to achieve different results in different courts creates an incentive not merely for forum shopping but also for a race to judgment in which parties pursue parallel litigation in hand-picked forums that each hopes will be the first to deliver a final result.60 60.See O’Hara, Opting, supra note 40, at 1566 (“Unfortunately, however, enforcement of these clauses often turns on an ex post race to judgment.”); see also Viva R. Moffat, Making Non-Competes Unenforceable, 54 Ariz. L. Rev. 939, 959 (2012) (noting that disparities in enforcement of both choice-of-law clauses and noncompetes lead to a situation in which both parties “race to the courthouse in an effort to have the jurisdiction with the more favorable law hear the case”). A widely invoked example of this situation is the litigation underlying Advanced Bionics Corp. v. Medtronic, Inc., in which parallel proceedings in Minnesota and California considered the same noncompete but arrived at different outcomes. 59 P.3d 231 (Cal. 2002) (analyzing both Minnesota and California court proceedings). The two courts each ultimately issued contradictory injunctions forbidding the parties from proceeding in the other court, a standoff only resolved when the California Supreme Court ultimately gave way and dissolved the Californian lower court’s injunction. See id. at 237–38; see also Moffat, supranote 60, at 960–63 (describing the case’s procedural history in detail).Show More

A more fundamental objection, however, is that the practice of using a choice-of-law clause to validate a specific provision not only tends to foster judicial confusion, but is out of keeping with the fundamental goals of contractual choice-of-law enforcement. At first glance, this second point might seem counterintuitive: isn’t the whole point of contractual choice-of-law provisions to allow parties to specify the law that will govern their contract? Yet, as this Article will discuss in detail, most advocates of choice-of-law enforcement have assumed that parties will generally choose a particular jurisdiction’s law for reasons other than the content of specific substantive rules—reasons such as, for example, a jurisdiction’s general expertise in a particular area, the desire to choose a law with which both parties are familiar, or the wish to avoid uncertainty.61 61.See infra notes 130–34 and accompanying text.Show More Indeed, conflicts scholars have fairly consistently agreed that contractual choice-of-law clauses should not be used to evade a jurisdiction’s public policy, particularly when it is a strongly defined one.62 62.See infra notes 155–58 and accompanying text.Show More The current approach, however, allows parties to do so in many circumstances, limiting them only through a narrow, difficult-to-apply exception to the general policy of enforcement.63 63.SeeSecond Restatement § 187(2) (delineating a three-pronged exception to the general policy of enforcement).Show More

In response to this situation, this Article argues for a new way of conceptualizing the issue. Rather than fall back on complicated public policy exceptions to contractual choice of law, courts should instead recognize, and generally refuse to enforce, a particularly problematic category of choice-of-law clauses—those that are adopted specifically in the hope of validating a separate contractual provision. This Article refers to such clauses as “substance-targeted.” A provision is substance-targeted, for example, when it reflects an employer’s wish to substitute more favorable Michigan law for the less noncompete-friendly law that would otherwise apply to its Louisiana employee.

Courts typically do not distinguish between targeted and non-targeted choice-of-law clauses. As a result, targeted clauses are often treated as if they represent an ordinary instance of allowing contracting parties to have autonomy to choose the law applicable to their dispute.64 64.See, e.g., Stone Surgical, LLC v. Stryker Corp., 858 F.3d 383, 391 (6th Cir. 2017) (finding “no reason to disturb the parties’ choice of Michigan law” with respect to a noncompete where no state had a materially greater interest than Michigan).Show More Yet they involve meaningfully different considerations, both because of the reasons that parties choose to include them and because of their ultimate effects. Unlike conventional choice-of-law clauses, substance-targeted clauses are neither aimed at achieving predictability nor likely to result in it. Their frequent use encourages litigation, disadvantages weaker parties, and fosters fears about results-oriented reasoning when their enforceability is tested.65 65.See infra Subsection II.B.3.Show More More broadly, scholars have raised concerns about the possibility that choice-of-law clauses adopted to gain the benefit of substantive rules will “undermine the enforcement of public regulatory statutes designed to safeguard a particular vision of the market.”66 66.See Moon, supra note 42, at 325.Show More These pernicious effects—unlike the normally positive consequences of enforcing non-targeted clauses—call for a fundamentally different approach to choice-of-law analyses.

While other authors have advocated reforms in the courts’ approach to choice-of-law clauses,67 67.Notably, Larry Ribstein has argued that courts should “enforce express written choice-of-law clauses notwithstanding common law or statutory restrictions on enforcement, except when the clause is explicitly prohibited by a state where a contracting party resides and no party resides in the designated state.” Ribstein, Efficiency, supra note 30, at 368. Elsewhere, Erin A. O’Hara and Ribstein advocate for a somewhat similar approach under which “choice-maximizing rules proposed in this Article operate as default rules that legislatures can overrule by explicit statutes where necessary to preserve their power to legislate effectively.” Erin A. O’Hara & Larry E. Ribstein, From Politics to Efficiency in Choice of Law, 67 U. Chi. L. Rev.1151, 1153 (2000). In contrast to O’Hara and Ribstein, this Article’s central focus in reforming contractual choice of law is not on legislative involvement, although it does argue that a legislative role in defining areas of significant policy is desirable. See infra notes 269–70 and accompanying text. Rather, this Article argues that targeted and non-targeted choice-of-law clauses are fundamentally different and require distinct treatment.Show More this Article is the first to identify and propose a solution to the problem of substance targeting. The Article argues that it is feasible for courts to identify substance-targeted clauses68 68.See infra Section III.A.Show More and that, once so categorized, such provisions—because they fail to serve the goals of contractual choice of law more generally—should typically not be enforced.69 69.See infra Section III.B.Show More

This Article proceeds in three Parts. The first Part describes the typical framework applied to the enforceability of choice-of-law clauses in the United States. The second argues that substance-targeted choice-of-law clauses should represent a distinct category of conflicts analysis and discusses the reasons why current doctrine fails to adequately address the issues such conflicts present. Finally, the Article sets forth a proposal for reform, arguing that targeted choice-of-law clauses implicating questions of policy should be unenforceable in most cases.

  1. * Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis, School of Law; visiting scholar, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, 2018–19. I wish to thank Afra Afsharipour and Kevin Johnson for financial support; John Coyle, David Horton, John Patrick Hunt, Lisa Ikemoto, and Courtney Joslin for insightful comments; and Niharika Sachdeva for helpful research assistance. I also thank my hosts at the Freie Universität: Dr. Andreas Fijal, Dr. Felix Hartmann, and Ms. Grit Rother. ↑
  2. See Stone Surgical, LLC v. Stryker Corp., 858 F.3d 383, 386 (6th Cir. 2017). ↑
  3. Ridgeway initially disputed the authenticity of the noncompete agreement, but evidence produced in discovery suggested that Ridgeway had received a form noncompete identical to 132 others Stryker had signed with its employees over a five-year period. Id. at 387–88. A jury later found that Ridgeway had signed the noncompete. Id. at 388. ↑
  4. Id. at 386. ↑
  5. Id. Stryker unsurprisingly disputed Ridgeway’s view of these conversations, maintaining that they related instead to whether Ridgeway had signed a second noncompete that would enable him to receive stock options. Id. at 387. ↑
  6. Id. at 386. ↑
  7. Id. at 387. ↑
  8. Ridgeway was fired on September 10, 2013; Stryker filed suit on September 30, 2013. See Complaint for Injunctive and Other Relief at 4, 34, Stryker Corp. v. Ridgeway, No. 1:13-cv-01066 (W.D. Mich. Sept. 30, 2013), 2013 WL 5526657. ↑
  9. See Amended Complaint at 1–2, Stryker Corp. v. Ridgeway, No. 1:13-cv-01066 (W.D. Mich. Oct. 21, 2013), 2013 WL 11276336. ↑
  10. See Stone Surgical, 858 F.3d at 391. ↑
  11. See Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws §§ 187(2), 188(1) (Am. Law Inst. 1971) [hereinafter Second Restatement]. ↑
  12. Stone Surgical, 858 F.3d at 391. ↑
  13. Id. ↑
  14. Id. at 388. The jury also denied relief to Ridgeway in his counterclaims against Stryker, which he originally filed in a separate proceeding but were ultimately consolidated with Stryker’s action. Id. ↑
  15. Id. at 387. ↑
  16. See Voluntary Petition for Individuals Filing for Bankruptcy, In re Christopher Martin Ridgeway, No. 16-10643 (Bankr. E.D. La. Mar. 23, 2016). ↑
  17. Freeman Expositions, Inc. v. Glob. Experience Specialists, Inc., No. SACV 17-00364, 2017 WL 1488269, at *1 (C.D. Cal. Apr. 24, 2017). ↑
  18. See id. (“During Mr. Shores’ work at GES, eighty to ninety percent of his sales were for events in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the vast majority of his clients were primarily engaged in Las Vegas.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). ↑
  19. Id. ↑
  20. Id. ↑
  21. See id. at *2. One asked him “Do you really want to go down this road?” and explained that “[o]ne path is to remain with GES and the other path is to go with Freeman and get sued and go broke. It is a lot easier to get out of an offer letter than a non-compete agreement.” Id. ↑
  22. See id. ↑
  23. See id. at *5. ↑
  24. Ridgeway, after all, had left a Louisiana-based sales job for another employer in Louisiana; his only contact with Michigan was that his former employer was headquartered there. See Stone Surgical, LLC v. Stryker Corp., 858 F.3d 383, 386–87, 390 (6th Cir. 2017). By contrast, Shores had lived and worked in Nevada prior to beginning employment with Freeman. See Freeman Expositions, 2017 WL 1488269, at *1. ↑
  25. See Freeman Expositions, 2017 WL 1488269, at *5. ↑
  26. Id. at *5. ↑
  27. Id. ↑
  28. See id. at *1, *3. The court also declined to dismiss a claim by Freeman for interference with its contractual relationship with Shores. See id. at *8. ↑
  29. As early as 1993, one commentator observed that the issue of choice-of-law enforcement in difficult cases “has generated a raft of judicial decisions marked by confusion, temerity, and vacillation.” Kirt O’Neill, Note, Contractual Choice of Law: The Case for a New Determination of Full Faith and Credit Limitations, 71 Tex. L. Rev. 1019, 1020 (1993). ↑
  30. See Catherine L. Fisk, Reflections on The New Psychological Contract and the Ownership of Human Capital, 34 Conn. L. Rev
    .

    765, 782–83 (2002). ↑

  31. See Larry E. Ribstein, From Efficiency to Politics in Contractual Choice of Law, 37 Ga. L. Rev. 363, 367 (2003) [hereinafter Ribstein, Efficiency] (noting that “the number of cases involving contractual choice is increasing significantly over time”). ↑
  32. See Norman D. Bishara & David Orozco, Using the Resource-Based Theory To Determine Covenant Not To Compete Legitimacy, 87 Ind. L.J. 979, 980, 984–85 (2012) (discussing the need to adapt the law governing noncompetes in a world where a “trend toward the greater use of noncompetes is occurring when . . . geographic boundaries are becoming less important to economic activity”); Gillian Lester & Elizabeth Ryan, Choice of Law and Employee Restrictive Covenants: An American Perspective, 31 Comp. Lab. L. & Pol’y J. 389, 389 (2010) (noting that more mobile employees and more geographically dispersed employers have contributed to a rise in noncompete litigation). ↑
  33.  See Steven Greenhouse, Noncompete Clauses Increasingly Pop Up in
    Array of Jobs, N.Y. Times (June 8, 2014), https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/­business/­noncompete-clauses-increasingly-pop-up-in-array-of-jobs.html?r=0 [https://perma.cc/4KQY-H9PV]. ↑
  34. See id. ↑
  35. See Matt O’Brien, Even Janitors Have Noncompetes Now. Nobody Is Safe., Wash. Post. (Oct. 18, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/­18/even-janitors-have-noncompetes-now-nobody-is-safe/?utm_term=.c316c5c­61­487 [https://perma.cc/W7FU-S6M6]. ↑
  36. See id. ↑
  37. See id. (describing suit by employer against janitor that was dropped following media coverage). ↑
  38. See Stuart Lichten & Eric M. Fink, “Just When I Thought I Was Out . . . .”: Post-Employment Repayment Obligations, 25 Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc.
    Just. 51, 54 (2018) (describing growth of such provisions’ popularity). These arrangements have recently attracted national publicity for, among other things, the threat they may pose to journalistic independence. See id. at 54–55. Many Sinclair Broadcasting employees, for example, chose to read “politically charged” statements on air, despite their personal reservations, because of worries about triggering repayment clauses in their contracts. Id. The statements were described as “prepackaged reports reflecting conservative views.” Id. at 54 n.15 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). ↑
  39. See id. at 68–69, 77–78 (noting differences in particular between the law of California and of other states on the enforceability of post-employment repayment obligations). ↑
  40. It is difficult to assess exactly how common choice-of-law clauses are in such agreements because employment contracts are often between private parties. See Norman D. Bishara, Kenneth J. Martin & Randall S. Thomas, An Empirical Analysis of Noncompetition Clauses and Other Restrictive Postemployment Covenants, 68 Vand. L. Rev. 1, 7 (2015). However, it is reasonable to speculate that employers frequently include such provisions, given their popularity in the noncompete context and the uncertainty of the law in this area. For an example of one such case, see Willis Re Inc. v. Hearn, 200 F. Supp. 3d 540, 545–47 (E.D. Pa. 2016) (discussing contractual choice-of-law clause in dispute involving repayment of a retention bonus following employee’s departure for a competitor). ↑
  41. See Erin Ann O’Hara, Opting Out of Regulation: A Public Choice Analysis of Contractual Choice of Law, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1551, 1563–64 (2000) [hereinafter O’Hara, Opting] (noting that, in contrast to the approach of the First Restatement, courts have transitioned to “almost uniformly enforc[ing] choice-of-law provisions that enable the parties to evade state usury laws”). The Second Restatement likely played a role in this acceptance by including a fairly liberal usury provision that operates even in the absence of a choice-of-law clause, providing that a given interest rate will not be invalidated on usury grounds if it is “permissible in a state to which the contract has a substantial relationship” and “not greatly in excess of the rate permitted by the general usury law of the state of the otherwise applicable law.” Second Restatement § 203. The “substantial relationship” requirement is fairly easily satisfied—if, for example, the applicable rate is that of the lender’s place of business or the place where the loan is to be repaid. See Robert Allen Sedler, The Contracts Provisions of the Restatement (Second): An Analysis and a Critique, 72 Colum. L. Rev. 279, 315–18 (1972). ↑
  42. See Fleetwood Servs., LLC v. Complete Bus. Sols. Grp., 374 F. Supp. 3d 361, 372 (E.D. Pa. 2019) (finding that, despite parties’ choice of Pennsylvania law, Texas law applied because Texas had the most significant relationship to the dispute and “applying Pennsylvania law would violate a fundamental public policy of Texas, namely its antipathy to high interest rates” (internal quotation marks omitted)); Am. Equities Grp. v. Ahava Dairy Prods. Corp., No. 01 Civ.5207, 2004 WL 870260, at *7–9 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 23, 2004) (declining to enforce a choice of New Jersey law in a case involving a usury defense on the same grounds); Am. Express Travel Related Servs. Co. v. Assih, 893 N.Y.S.2d 438, 445–46 (N.Y. Civ. Ct. 2009) (declining to enforce a choice of Utah law in action to collect credit card payments based on New York’s materially greater interest and “strong public policy against interest rates which are excessive”); see also TriBar Op. Comm., Supp. Report: Opinions on Chosen-Law Provisions Under the Restatement of Conflict of Laws, 68 Bus. Law. 1161, 1161–62, 1162 n.2 (2013) (discussing analysis of this issue in New York courts and noting that it deviates somewhat from the orthodox Second Restatement approach). ↑
  43. See William J. Moon, Contracting Out of Public Law, 55 Harv. J. on Legis
    .

    323, 347 (2018) (“[C]ourts have consistently refused to enforce choice-of-law clauses in the context of . . . consumer contracts.”). In some cases, this refusal has been based on concerns about the substantive content of the chosen law. See, e.g., Masters v. DirecTV, Inc., Nos. 08-55825 & 08–55830, 2009 WL 4885132, at *1 (9th Cir. Nov. 19, 2009) (holding that California law, rather than the parties’ chosen law, applied to consumer class action waivers because such waivers were contrary to a fundamental policy in California); see also William J. Woodward Jr., Legal Uncertainty and Aberrant Contracts: The Choice of Law Clause, 89 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 197, 207–09 (2014) [hereinafter Woodward, Aberrant] (discussing case law on enforcement of choice-of-law clauses in questions regarding the applicability of state statutes that convert one-way attorney’s-fee-shifting provisions into two-way provisions). Procedural concerns about information asymmetry and bargaining power disparities in form consumer contracts may also weigh in favor of non-enforcement. See generally Giesela Rühl, Consumer Protection in Choice of Law, 44 Cornell Int’l L.J. 569 (2011) (considering these issues and advocating for European-style limits on choice of law in consumer contracts). ↑

  44. See Andrew Elmore, Franchise Regulation for the Fissured Economy, 86 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 907, 954 n.229 (2018) (“States prohibit choice of law provisions and waivers in franchise agreements to contract around state franchise law obligations, which will foreclose evasions of a liability through waiver.”). For example, in Wright-Moore Corp. v. Ricoh Corp., the court found that Indiana law applied, rather than the parties’ chosen law of New York, because Indiana had a materially greater interest in the dispute and waiver of a franchisee’s rights was against Indiana’s fundamental policy. 908 F.2d 128, 132–33 (7th Cir. 1990). ↑
  45. See, e.g., In re Facebook Biometric Info. Privacy Litig., 185 F. Supp. 3d 1155, 1169–70 (N.D. Cal. 2016) (concluding that a California choice-of-law provision could not be enforced where “California has not legislatively recognized a right to privacy in personal biometric data and has not implemented any specific protections for that right” and biometric data protection was a fundamental policy in Illinois, the state of the most significant relationship). ↑
  46. See J. Kelly Barnes, Telemedicine: A Conflict of Laws Problem Waiting To Happen—How Will Interstate and International Claims Be Decided?, 28 Hous. J. Int’l L. 491, 526–28 (2006) (discussing potential enforceability of choice-of-law clauses in the context of telemedicine). ↑
  47. See O’Hara, Opting, supra note 40, at 1564–65 (“Antenuptial agreements are also incorporating choice-of-law provisions with mounting, albeit tentative, judicial support.”); see also John F. Coyle, A Short History of the Choice-of-Law Clause, 91 Colo. L. Rev. 1147, 1162–63, 1162 n.42 (2020) (noting that an example of such a clause exists as far back as 1874). ↑
  48. See Linda J. Ravdin, Premarital Agreements and the Migratory Same-Sex Couple, 48 Fam. L.Q. 397, 406 (2014). ↑
  49. See, e.g., Hodas v. Morin, 814 N.E.2d 320, 325–26 (Mass. 2004) (applying Section 187 of the Second Restatement to determine that a surrogacy agreement was valid and finding that no state other than the state of the chosen law, Massachusetts, clearly had the “materially greater” relationship to the dispute). Martha A. Field summarizes the manifold approaches states take toward surrogacy contracts, including fairly broad enforcement, enforcement provided certain requirements are met, toleration without explicitly regulating the subject, and criminalizing paid surrogacy. See Martha A. Field, Compensated Surrogacy, 89 Wash. L. Rev. 1155, 1161–65 (2014). Parties to such contracts have sometimes selected the law of a state hospitable to surrogacy, clauses that courts have enforced in some cases “notwithstanding manipulated contacts with the selected state and strong anti-surrogacy policies in the gestational carrier’s domicile.” Susan Frelich Appleton, Leaving Home? Domicile, Family, and Gender, 47 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1453, 1512 (2014). Parties, however, cannot count on such a result, meaning that “the safest approach [for parties to a surrogacy contract] is to do something substantial in connection with the surrogacy arrangement in that state beyond just choosing its law.” See Joseph F. Morrissey, Surrogacy: The Process, the Law, and the Contracts, 51 Willamette L. Rev. 459, 509 (2015) (also noting that “courts may not honor the choice-of-law provision” in the absence of a substantial contact such as “using a clinic in [the] state [of the chosen law], or using an agency, surrogate or egg donor from that state”). ↑
  50. See supra note 23 and accompanying text. ↑
  51. See Woodward, Aberrant, supra note 42, at 208–09 (discussing the uncertainty created by the “fact-based and hopelessly uncertain” analysis under Section 187). ↑
  52. See infra notes 89–94 and accompanying text. ↑
  53. See infra Subsection II.B.3. ↑
  54.  See David A. Linehan, Due Process Denied: The Forgotten Constitutional Limits on Choice of Law in the Enforcement of Employee Covenants Not To Compete, 2012 Utah L. Rev. 209, 213 (positing that courts, rather than respecting relevant constitutional constraints, “expansively apply their own restrictive rules against noncompetes to virtually any dispute tried within their borders”). ↑
  55.  See Timothy P. Glynn, Interjurisdictional Competition in Enforcing Non-competition Agreements: Regulatory Risk Management and the Race to the Bottom, 65 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1381, 1386–87 (2008) (describing and positing the likely future growth of a phenomenon whereby states seek to export their employer-friendly policies extraterritorially by broadly enforcing both noncompetes and choice-of-law clauses). ↑
  56. See Linehan, supra note 53, at 212 (arguing that courts have applied their choice-of-law principles in noncompete cases in a way that “fail[s] to respect due process constraints on their power to prefer their own laws to those of sister states”). ↑
  57. See id. at 211. ↑
  58.  See, e.g., Lawrence J. La Sala, Note, Partner Bankruptcy and Partnership Dissolution: Protecting the Terms of the Contract and Ensuring Predictability, 59 Fordham L. Rev. 619, 643 n.135 (1991) (“Because parties normally will not enter into a contract if they are unable to foresee accurately their rights and liabilities under the contract, predictability is a prime objective of contract law.”). ↑
  59.  See Glynn, supra note 54, at 1385 (calling attention to “the rise of interjurisdictional disputes involving [noncompete] enforcement”). ↑
  60.  See, e.g., Woodward, Aberrant, supra note 42, at 212 (noting that “many rational clients will forego using a lawyer in a small claim or defense if they risk paying their lawyer more (probably far more) than the claim or defense is worth”). ↑
  61.  See O’Hara, Opting, supra note 40, at 1566 (“Unfortunately, however, enforcement of these clauses often turns on an ex post race to judgment.”); see also Viva R. Moffat, Making Non-Competes Unenforceable, 54 Ariz. L. Rev
    .

    939, 959 (2012) (noting that disparities in enforcement of both choice-of-law clauses and noncompetes lead to a situation in which both parties “race to the courthouse in an effort to have the jurisdiction with the more favorable law hear the case”). A widely invoked example of this situation is the litigation underlying Advanced Bionics Corp. v. Medtronic, Inc., in which parallel proceedings in Minnesota and California considered the same noncompete but arrived at different outcomes. 59 P.3d 231 (Cal. 2002) (analyzing both Minnesota and California court proceedings). The two courts each ultimately issued contradictory injunctions forbidding the parties from proceeding in the other court, a standoff only resolved when the California Supreme Court ultimately gave way and dissolved the Californian lower court’s injunction. See id. at 237–38; see also Moffat, supra note 60, at 960–63 (describing the case’s procedural history in detail). ↑

  62. See infra notes 130–34 and accompanying text. ↑
  63. See infra notes 155–58 and accompanying text. ↑
  64. See Second Restatement § 187(2) (delineating a three-pronged exception to the general policy of enforcement). ↑
  65. See, e.g., Stone Surgical, LLC v. Stryker Corp., 858 F.3d 383, 391 (6th Cir. 2017) (finding “no reason to disturb the parties’ choice of Michigan law” with respect to a noncompete where no state had a materially greater interest than Michigan). ↑
  66. See infra Subsection II.B.3. ↑
  67. See Moon, supra note 42, at 325. ↑
  68. Notably, Larry Ribstein has argued that courts should “enforce express written choice-of-law clauses notwithstanding common law or statutory restrictions on enforcement, except when the clause is explicitly prohibited by a state where a contracting party resides and no party resides in the designated state.” Ribstein, Efficiency, supra note 30, at 368. Elsewhere, Erin A. O’Hara and Ribstein advocate for a somewhat similar approach under which “choice-maximizing rules proposed in this Article operate as default rules that legislatures can overrule by explicit statutes where necessary to preserve their power to legislate effectively.” Erin A. O’Hara & Larry E. Ribstein, From Politics to Efficiency in Choice of Law, 67 U. Chi. L. Rev.
     

    1151, 1153 (2000). In contrast to O’Hara and Ribstein, this Article’s central focus in reforming contractual choice of law is not on legislative involvement, although it does argue that a legislative role in defining areas of significant policy is desirable. See infra notes 269–70 and accompanying text. Rather, this Article argues that targeted and non-targeted choice-of-law clauses are fundamentally different and require distinct treatment. ↑

  69. See infra Section III.A. ↑
  70. See infra Section III.B. ↑

The Structures of Local Courts

Local courts are, by far, the most commonly used courts in our justice system. Cases filed in local courts outnumber those filed in federal court by a factor of over two hundred. Few litigants who receive local-court judgments appeal the matter further. The justice we possess is thus largely the justice created by local courts, but they are largely absent from the law school curriculum. We know astonishingly little about them.

This Article begins to remedy that absence by providing a structural account of local courts that situates them as distinct institutions within the justice system. Because local courts are influenced by all levels of government—federal, state, and local—they exhibit a radical diversity—not just between states but within them, and not just in the way that they operate but in their organizing principles. The Article links the many problems experienced by local courts—chronic underfunding and a lack of oversight cause problems that run deep—with the state and federal structures that shape local-court function and administration. On the state side, the Article analyzes hand-coded, raw survey data from the National Center for State Courts to describe the interactions between local courts and administrative bodies within state judicial branches. Although states differ, administrative distance between state and local institutions joined with the rarity of appeals from local-court judgments makes local courts meaningfully independent from the state system. Federal law compounds this independence by sheltering local courts from external scrutiny. Judicial federalism doctrines like preclusion, abstention, and habeas corpus require federal courts to defer to the legal and factual findings of local courts. Federal enforcement doctrines like standing and immunity protect local courts from legal reform efforts.

The Article then reevaluates our theories of judicial federalism in light of the diversity and problems of local courts. It argues that the values of judicial federalism invoked by both courts and scholars rely on the fiction that state courts are monoliths. In fact, the reality of state courts—including the diversity and relative obscurity of local courts—frustrate these values. Instead, the Article argues that the more valuable conceptual function of local courts is not normative but rather descriptive: they provide us with an understanding of the justice we have, not the justice we aspire to or the justice required by law. They—and not federal courts—are the starting points from which we should define and evaluate our system of justice.

Introduction

Ten years ago, I visited the courthouse in Wilkinson County, a small, majority-Black county in the southwest corner of Mississippi. It had an old and genteel Beaux-Arts façade and stood in the center of a town square, lending a sense of history to the diners and clothing stores around. Inside, dust yellowed the windows, blotches deepened the color of the carpets, holes in the ceilings exposed electrical wires. Marriage records labeled “White” and “Colored” through 1984 filled the county clerk’s bookcases. Many forms of history.1 1.Courthouse architecture is a fascinating topic in its own right. See Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011); Norman W. Spaulding, The Enclosure of Justice: Courthouse Architecture, Due Process, and the Dead Metaphor of Trial, 24 Yale J.L. & Human. 311, 315 (2012) (“[T]he American concept of due process of law is itself intimately bound up with the location, design, and use of law’s administrative space.”). For recent images of local courts around the country, see American Courthouses: A Photo Archive by John Deacon, http://www.courthouses.co/ (last visited Apr. 12, 2020) [https://perma.cc/K2MQ-UYMN].Deteriorating physical conditions of local courthouses are not unique to Wilkinson County and go beyond “complaints about the color of the carpeting.” ISBA Special Comm. on Fair & Impartial Courts, Ill. State Bar Ass’n, Report on the Funding Crisis in the Illinois Courts 20 (2013) [hereinafter ISBA Report], https://www.isba.org/sites/default/files/­committees/Report%20on%20the%20Funding%20Crisis%20in%20the%20Illinois%20Courts.pdf [https://perma.cc/B54U-CMAP]. An Illinois State Bar Association report, for example, describes local courthouses with “mold visibly growing on the ceilings” and courthouses with heating and air conditioning systems so ineffective that “some rooms . . . are almost as warm as a sauna and other rooms . . . are ridiculously cold all on the same day.” Id. at 20 & 20 n.45. For more examples, see generally infra Section I.B.Show More

Local courts like this one—including both general-jurisdiction trial-level courts and limited-jurisdiction hyperlocal courts like municipal and justice courts2 2.The diversity of local courts makes defining the category an important part of the analysis. For a more detailed explanation, see infra Part I.Show More—are overwhelmingly likely to have both the first and final words in any dispute within the justice system. Litigants file tens of millions of cases in local courts each year, outnumbering cases filed in federal court by a factor of over two hundred.3 3.See infra Part I.Show More Few litigants who receive local-court judgments appeal the matter further.

The justice we possess is thus largely the justice created by local courts. It is a diverse justice. Because local courts are influenced by all levels of government—federal, state, and local—they exhibit a radical diversity—not just between states but within them, and not just in the way that they operate but in their organizing structures. We tolerate, even celebrate, that diversity. We believe it encourages the “creative ferment of experimentation.”4 4.See Paul M. Bator, The State Courts and Federal Constitutional Litigation, 22 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 605, 634 (1981) (“Do we not derive enormous benefits from having a variety of institutional ‘sets’ within which issues of federal constitutional law are addressed? The creative ferment of experimentation which federalism encourages is not irrelevant to the task of constitutional adjudication.”).Show More And sometimes, local courts vindicate this promise. At their best, local courts can be laboratories for innovative approaches to justice tailored to the communities they serve.5 5.For examples of how local courts have piloted programs meant to improve justice for individuals, communities, and businesses, see generally infra Section I.A.Show More

But this innovation, when it exists, is matched—at times overmatched—by the injustice that takes place there. Chronic underfunding and a lack of oversight cause problems that run deep. Some local courts are full of violations of federal law, including overlong waits for trial, a dearth of interpreters, ineffective and non-existent public defense programs, inaccessible facilities, and fines and debtor’s prisons that have devastating impacts on indigent defendants. These problems are not only deep; they are vast: most states have some identified problem with their local courts.6 6.See infra Section I.B.Show More

Despite these massive stakes, despite the place of local courts at the heart of the justice system, and despite even the compelling human stories that unfold in these courts, we know very little about them.7 7.See Annie Decker, A Theory of Local Common Law, 35 Cardozo L. Rev. 1939, 1943–44 (2014) (noting a lack of empirical studies about local courts); Ethan J. Leib, Localist Statutory Interpretation, 161 U. Pa. L. Rev. 897, 898–99 (2013) (“[L]egal scholars have almost universally ignored the law in local courts, favoring the study of federal courts and state appellate courts.”); Stephen C. Yeazell, Courting Ignorance: Why We Know So Little About Our Most Important Courts, 143 Daedalus 129, 129 (2014) (“[A]s we drown in data about everything else under the sun, we know remarkably little about how [local] courts actually work.”).Show More Their opinions are often unpublished and their proceedings are rarely transcribed.8 8.See infra Subsection II.A.2.Show More They are completely absent from the core law school curriculum.9 9.Others have offered explanations for this erasure. Annie Decker has speculated that the number and diversity of local courts overwhelm us with “anticipatory fatigue.” See Decker, supra note 7, at 1943. Ethan Leib has suggested that we ignore local courts because their opinions are unpublished and inaccessible. See Leib, supra note 7, at 907–08 (“Admittedly, it is not easy to ascertain what is occurring in these local courtrooms with a high level of confidence. Because local courts are much less likely to publish their decisions than state courts higher in the judicial hierarchy, a scholar would need to sit in local courtrooms for long periods of time and read reams of motion papers to discover with any degree of reliability what goes on in these halls of justice.”). As I describe later, these explanations are likely correct, but incomplete.Though local courts are largely absent from doctrinal classes, they are not absent from clinical work, which often takes place within local courts.Show More

This Article begins to remedy that absence by providing a structural account of local courts that situates them as distinct institutions within the justice system. It links the problems experienced by these courts with the state and federal laws that influence local-court function and administration. On the state side, the Article provides new accounts of the administrative and substantive relationships between local courts and state government. It describes how states create and shape the basic contours of local courts through policies that determine how local courts are funded and how local judges are selected.10 10.See infra Subsection II.A.1.Show More It uses hand-coded, raw survey data from the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to illustrate the kinds of formal and informal interactions that exist between local courts and state judicial administrative offices. Although states differ, legal and administrative distance between state and local institutions joined with the rarity of appeals from local-court judgments and the scarcity of other quality control mechanisms makes local courts meaningfully independent from their state systems.11 11.See infra Subsection II.A.2.Show More

Federal law compounds this independence by sheltering local courts from external scrutiny. Judicial federalism doctrines—specifically preclusion, abstention, and habeas corpus—require federal courts to defer to the legal and factual findings of state courts. In practice, these doctrines require deference to local courts.12 12.See infra Subsection II.B.1.Show More As a consequence, federal courts provide surprisingly little oversight of the workings of local courts. And federal enforcement doctrines like standing and immunity protect local courts from legal reform efforts.13 13.See infra Subsection II.B.2.Show More

This structural analysis provides insights not only into local-court functioning but into scholarship on federalism, judicial federalism, and our justice system broadly. Theories of judicial federalism that promote state courts as useful administrators of federal law, invoked by both courts and scholars that draw from the general values of federalism, rely on the myth that state courts are monolithic institutions. In fact, the reality of state courts—including their diversity, relative obscurity, and independence from state institutions—frustrates these values and counsels against deference to local-court decision making.14 14.See infra Section III.A.Show More

In addition, theories of judicial federalism miss what I believe is the principal conceptual function of local courts: providing us with an understanding of the justice we have, not the justice we aspire to or the justice required by law. If we look closely enough, we can see that where local courts fail, they fail in part because we allow them to fail. We underfund local courts; we tolerate state systems that do not supervise them; and we have declined to create a federal bureaucracy to monitor them. Local courts—and not federal courts—are the starting point from which we should define and evaluate our system of justice.15 15.See infra Section III.B.Show More

This analysis requires some methodological novelty. To build a structural argument, the Article weaves together state and local laws, state judicial administration, federal courts doctrines, and federal enforcement laws. What might appear to be a motley collection of legal authorities actually underscores one reason why studying local courts has been such a challenge: no single discipline offers an analytic framework sufficient to capture the reality of local courts. Four areas deeply informed by these courts—federal courts, civil procedure, state government, and local government—all ignore them. The field of federal courts, for one, addresses jurisdictional questions that directly affect the reach of local courts. And yet to the extent federal courts scholarship acknowledges local courts at all, it describes them in generalities and fails to engage with, or even inquire into, their structural and experiential realities.16 16.By their own admission, federal courts scholars have treated local courts as “the neglected stepchild of the field.” Michael E. Solimine & James L. Walker, Respecting State Courts: The Inevitability of Judicial Federalism 141 (1999). As an example, consider the question of “parity,” a foundational concept in federal courts which refers to the relative competence of state and federal courts to adjudicate federal claims. Though parity directly bears upon the abilities of local courts, parity literature has never considered the diversity of local court ability, the particular challenges that local courts face, or the complex relationships these courts have with the rest of the state system. See, e.g., Bator, supra note 4, at 622–23 (calling state and federal courts “partners” in the endeavor to enforce federal constitutional principles and elaborating on federal-court competence); Burt Neuborne, The Myth of Parity, 90 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1105–06 (1977) (arguing that a belief in parity is “at best, a dangerous myth” and that jurisdictional decisions are not outcome-neutral).Show More Civil procedure scholarship focuses “primarily, if not exclusively, on federal litigation and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”17 17.See Barbara A. Babcock, Toni M. Massaro & Norman W. Spaulding, The Ideal and the Actual in Procedural Due Process, in A Critical Guide to Civil Procedure (Brooke Coleman et al. eds., forthcoming 2020) (manuscript at 2) (on file with author); see also id. at 1–2 (“[T]he study of how due process works outside the federal courts in the spaces where the vast majority of ordinary people encounter the administration of justice generally does not resurface. . . . This is most unfortunate. . . . Students are increasingly taught ideal procedural justice . . . . Meanwhile, what most Americans experience is nothing like what the models of either administrative or judicial process describe, nothing like what we debate in studying procedure in the federal courts, whatever its defects.”).Show More Scholarship on state law, including my own, has ignored local courts in favor of the state legislative and executive branches.18 18.See Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Partisan Federalism, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1077 (2014) (situating state identity and partisanship within the larger system of federalism); Miriam Seifter, Further from the People? The Puzzle of State Administration, 93 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 107 (2018) (exploring the lack of transparency in state bureaucracy and its consequences); Miriam Seifter, Gubernatorial Administration, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 483, 484 (2017) (providing a history and functional analysis of gubernatorial power); Justin Weinstein-Tull, State Bureaucratic Undermining, 85 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1083 (2018) (describing the ways in which conflict between and among the state legislative and executive branches can undermine federal rights).Scholarship on state courts and the benefits of state-court constitutionalism—“new judicial federalism” scholarship—has also ignored local courts. See, e.g., Lawrence Friedman, The Constitutional Value of Dialogue and the New Judicial Federalism, 28 Hastings Const. L.Q. 93, 94–98 (2000) (arguing for state supreme courts to embrace a new role in constitutional interpretation without mentioning local courts).Show More Even local government literature, the usual stomping grounds for vital but non-national issues otherwise overlooked by the academy, has ignored local courts.19 19.Local government scholarship has “for too long failed to see local judges as the complex players they are in municipal governments.” Ethan J. Leib, Local Judges and Local Government, 18 N.Y.U. J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 707, 739 (2015); see also id. at 737 (“[L]ocal government scholars who spend time thinking about optimizing the relationships among different levels of government—federal, state, local—have much more work to do to situate local courts within this matrix.”).Instead, local government theory has largely focused on the balance of policymaking authority between state and local governments, see, e.g., David J. Barron, Reclaiming Home Rule, 116 Harv. L. Rev. 2255 (2003); Richard Briffault, Our Localism: Part I—The Structure of Local Government Law, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (1990); Gerald E. Frug, The City as a Legal Concept, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 1057 (1980), the liminal legal space occupied by local governments, see, e.g., Richard Thompson Ford, The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1841 (1994); Richard C. Schragger, The Limits of Localism, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 371 (2001); Joan C. Williams, The Constitutional Vulnerability of American Local Government: The Politics of City Status in American Law, 1986 Wis. L. Rev. 83, land use, urban planning, and governance problems unique to local government, see, e.g., Michelle Wilde Anderson, The New Minimal Cities, 123 Yale L.J. 1118 (2014); Nestor M. Davidson, Localist Administrative Law, 126 Yale L.J. 564 (2017); David Schleicher, City Unplanning, 122 Yale L.J. 1670 (2013), and federal-state-local relationships in various policy areas, see, e.g., Roderick M. Hills, Jr., Dissecting the State: The Use of Federal Law to Free State and Local Officials from State Legislatures’ Control, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1201 (1999); Cristina M. Rodríguez, The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation, 106 Mich. L. Rev. 567 (2008); Justin Weinstein-Tull, Election Law Federalism, 114 Mich. L. Rev. 747 (2016). This is not, of course, an exhaustive list of categories.Show More

The legal academy’s failure to account for local courts—with two narrow exceptions20 20.The first exception is misdemeanor criminal process. Scholars have unearthed fascinating (and horrifying) details of how criminal procedure works in the context of minor offenses tried in local courts. See, e.g., Malcolm M. Feeley, The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court (1992); Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing (2018) (describing the “procedural hassle” of criminal procedure in New York local courts); Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (2018); Alexandra Natapoff, Misdemeanors, 85 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1313, 1315 (2012) [hereinafter Natapoff, Misdemeanors] (“Most U.S. convictions are misdemeanors, and they are generated in ways that baldly contradict the standard due process model of criminal adjudication.”). And a deep literature exists that probes the rise of pleas and the process surrounding them. See, e.g., Josh Bowers, Punishing the Innocent, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1117 (2008); George Fisher, Plea Bargaining’s Triumph, 109 Yale L.J. 857 (2000); Thea Johnson, Fictional Pleas, 94 Ind. L.J. 855 (2019); Stephen J. Schulhofer, Plea Bargaining as Disaster, 101 Yale L.J. 1979 (1992).The second exception is the response to Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri. After Brown’s death, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report that detailed the failures of the Ferguson municipal court, including that the court handled criminal charges “not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue.” See U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Civil Rights Div., Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department 42 (2015) [hereinafter DOJ Ferguson Report] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/fergu­son_police_department_report.pdf [https://perma.cc/26R9-AB4B]. Scholars have since done illuminating work on local-court reform using Ferguson as a case study. See, e.g., Beth A. Colgan, Lessons from Ferguson on Individual Defense Representation as a Tool of Systemic Reform, 58 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1171 (2017) (describing the many constitutional rights violated by Ferguson’s local-court system and the impact of individual defense counsel on reform efforts); Fred O. Smith, Jr., Abstention in the Time of Ferguson, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 2283 (2018) (arguing that the Younger abstention doctrine precludes meaningful oversight of local courts and governments).Show More—has essentially divorced legal theory from the most fundamental and common experiences of our justice system. As a consequence, the study of local courts is unexpectedly nascent.21 21.Although there is essentially no academic legal scholarship on local courts as courts, illuminating scholarship does exist on specific issues that take place in local courts, including problems relating to problem-solving and subject-matter courts. See, e.g., Richard C. Boldt, Problem-Solving Courts and Pragmatism, 73 Md. L. Rev. 1120 (2014) (considering how pragmatism informs the judicial process in problem-solving courts); Erin R. Collins, Status Courts, 105 Geo. L.J. 1481 (2017) (describing the promise and pitfalls of local courts that are tailored to certain types of defendants); D. James Greiner, Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak & Jonathan Hennessy, The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in A Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 901 (2013) (empirically evaluating different kinds of legal services in Massachusetts district courts).But in the same way that we don’t consider the study of federal criminal law to satisfy our need to understand federal courts more broadly, neither does the study of specific legal issues that arise in local courts satisfy our need to understand local courts.Show More That status is perverse. Why should most litigants’ primary experiences with the legal system be academic afterthoughts?

Part I of this Article explains the high stakes—both practical and conceptual—associated with local courts. Part II links these problems with the structures of local courts by arguing that the state and federal systems do not provide significant oversight of these courts. Section II.A provides new accounts of the administrative and substantive relationships between local courts and their states. Section II.B describes how federal law shelters local courts from external scrutiny. Whereas Part II examines the effects of the state and federal systems on the internal workings of local courts, Part III does the opposite: it looks outward and reevaluates our thinking on judicial federalism in light of the diversity and problems of local courts.

I conclude by arguing that local courts should not be relegated to the status of quirky hybrid within the academy. I speculate about what a field of local courts would look like and suggest that treating local courts as a fundamental building block within the law would both solve a number of problems and create a promising set of questions for further study.

  1. * Associate Professor of Law, Arizona State University. I owe many thanks. First, to my fantastic research assistants: Samantha Burke, Lucas Hickman, Kelsey Merrick, Austin Marshall, and Jack Milligan. Second, to the judges and court administrators who told me stories and offered their ideas. Third, to the many readers whose generosity, thoughts, and suggestions I have not done justice: Michelle Anderson, Abbye Atkinson, Richard Briffault, Beth Colgan, Laura Coordes, Nestor Davidson, George Fisher, Deborah Hensler, Ethan Leib, Ron Levin, Kaipo Matsumura, Ben McJunkin, Jeannie Merino, Martha Minow, Michael Pollack, Dara Purvis, Trevor Reed, Michael Saks, Erin Scharff, Rich Schragger, Joshua Sellers, Michael Selmi, Bijal Shah, Jonathan Siegel, Shirin Sinnar, Fred Smith, Ji Seon Song, Norm Spaulding, David Super, Andrea Wang, participants of the Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, Junior Faculty Federal Courts Workshop, the State and Local Government Law Works-in-Progress Workshop, the American Constitution Society Junior Scholars Public Law Workshop, the Grey Fellows Forum, and faculty workshops at Arizona State University and U.C. Irvine. And finally, to Jordan Walsh and the editors of the Virginia Law Review for their thorough and tireless work. ↑
  2. Courthouse architecture is a fascinating topic in its own right. See Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011); Norman W. Spaulding, The Enclosure of Justice: Courthouse Architecture, Due Process, and the Dead Metaphor of Trial, 24 Yale J.L. & Human. 311, 315 (2012) (“[T]he American concept of due process of law is itself intimately bound up with the location, design, and use of law’s administrative space.”). For recent images of local courts around the country, see American Courthouses: A Photo Archive by John Deacon, http://www.courthouses.co/ (last visited Apr. 12, 2020) [https://perma.cc/K2MQ-UYMN].Deteriorating physical conditions of local courthouses are not unique to Wilkinson County and go beyond “complaints about the color of the carpeting.” ISBA Special Comm. on Fair & Impartial Courts, Ill. State Bar Ass’n, Report on the Funding Crisis in the Illinois
    Courts 20 (2013) [hereinafter ISBA Report], https://www.isba.org/sites/default/files/­committees/Report%20on%20the%20Funding%20Crisis%20in%20the%20Illinois%20Courts.pdf [https://perma.cc/B54U-CMAP]. An Illinois State Bar Association report, for example, describes local courthouses with “mold visibly growing on the ceilings” and courthouses with heating and air conditioning systems so ineffective that “some rooms . . . are almost as warm as a sauna and other rooms . . . are ridiculously cold all on the same day.” Id. at 20 & 20 n.45. For more examples, see generally infra Section I.B. ↑
  3. The diversity of local courts makes defining the category an important part of the analysis. For a more detailed explanation, see infra Part I. ↑
  4. See infra Part I. ↑
  5. See Paul M. Bator, The State Courts and Federal Constitutional Litigation, 22 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 605, 634 (1981) (“Do we not derive enormous benefits from having a variety of institutional ‘sets’ within which issues of federal constitutional law are addressed? The creative ferment of experimentation which federalism encourages is not irrelevant to the task of constitutional adjudication.”). ↑
  6. For examples of how local courts have piloted programs meant to improve justice for individuals, communities, and businesses, see generally infra Section I.A. ↑
  7. See infra Section I.B. ↑
  8. See Annie Decker, A Theory of Local Common Law, 35 Cardozo L. Rev. 1939, 1943–44 (2014) (noting a lack of empirical studies about local courts); Ethan J. Leib, Localist Statutory Interpretation, 161 U. Pa. L. Rev. 897, 898–99 (2013) (“[L]egal scholars have almost universally ignored the law in local courts, favoring the study of federal courts and state appellate courts.”); Stephen C. Yeazell, Courting Ignorance: Why We Know So Little About Our Most Important Courts, 143 Daedalus 129, 129 (2014) (“[A]s we drown in data about everything else under the sun, we know remarkably little about how [local] courts actually work.”). ↑
  9. See infra Subsection II.A.2. ↑
  10. Others have offered explanations for this erasure. Annie Decker has speculated that the number and diversity of local courts overwhelm us with “anticipatory fatigue.” See Decker, supra note 7, at 1943. Ethan Leib has suggested that we ignore local courts because their opinions are unpublished and inaccessible. See Leib, supra note 7, at 907–08 (“Admittedly, it is not easy to ascertain what is occurring in these local courtrooms with a high level of confidence. Because local courts are much less likely to publish their decisions than state courts higher in the judicial hierarchy, a scholar would need to sit in local courtrooms for long periods of time and read reams of motion papers to discover with any degree of reliability what goes on in these halls of justice.”). As I describe later, these explanations are likely correct, but incomplete.Though local courts are largely absent from doctrinal classes, they are not absent from clinical work, which often takes place within local courts. ↑
  11. See infra Subsection II.A.1. ↑
  12. See infra Subsection II.A.2. ↑
  13. See infra Subsection II.B.1. ↑
  14. See infra Subsection II.B.2. ↑
  15. See infra Section III.A. ↑
  16. See infra Section III.B. ↑
  17. By their own admission, federal courts scholars have treated local courts as “the neglected stepchild of the field.” Michael E. Solimine & James L. Walker, Respecting State Courts: The Inevitability of Judicial Federalism 141 (1999). As an example, consider the question of “parity,” a foundational concept in federal courts which refers to the relative competence of state and federal courts to adjudicate federal claims. Though parity directly bears upon the abilities of local courts, parity literature has never considered the diversity of local court ability, the particular challenges that local courts face, or the complex relationships these courts have with the rest of the state system. See, e.g., Bator, supra note 4, at 622–23 (calling state and federal courts “partners” in the endeavor to enforce federal constitutional principles and elaborating on federal-court competence); Burt Neuborne, The Myth of Parity, 90 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1105–06 (1977) (arguing that a belief in parity is “at best, a dangerous myth” and that jurisdictional decisions are not outcome-neutral). ↑
  18. See Barbara A. Babcock, Toni M. Massaro & Norman W. Spaulding, The Ideal and the Actual in Procedural Due Process, in A Critical Guide to Civil Procedure (Brooke Coleman et al. eds., forthcoming 2020) (manuscript at 2) (on file with author); see also id. at 1–2 (“[T]he study of how due process works outside the federal courts in the spaces where the vast majority of ordinary people encounter the administration of justice generally does not resurface. . . . This is most unfortunate. . . . Students are increasingly taught ideal procedural justice . . . . Meanwhile, what most Americans experience is nothing like what the models of either administrative or judicial process describe, nothing like what we debate in studying procedure in the federal courts, whatever its defects.”). ↑
  19. See Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Partisan Federalism, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1077 (2014) (situating state identity and partisanship within the larger system of federalism); Miriam Seifter, Further from the People? The Puzzle of State Administration, 93 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 107 (2018) (exploring the lack of transparency in state bureaucracy and its consequences); Miriam Seifter, Gubernatorial Administration, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 483, 484 (2017) (providing a history and functional analysis of gubernatorial power); Justin Weinstein-Tull, State Bureaucratic Undermining, 85 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1083 (2018) (describing the ways in which conflict between and among the state legislative and executive branches can undermine federal rights).Scholarship on state courts and the benefits of state-court constitutionalism—“new judicial federalism” scholarship—has also ignored local courts. See, e.g., Lawrence Friedman, The Constitutional Value of Dialogue and the New Judicial Federalism, 28 Hastings Const. L.Q. 93, 94–98 (2000) (arguing for state supreme courts to embrace a new role in constitutional interpretation without mentioning local courts). ↑
  20. Local government scholarship has “for too long failed to see local judges as the complex players they are in municipal governments.” Ethan J. Leib, Local Judges and Local Government, 18 N.Y.U. J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 707, 739 (2015); see also id. at 737 (“[L]ocal government scholars who spend time thinking about optimizing the relationships among different levels of government—federal, state, local—have much more work to do to situate local courts within this matrix.”).Instead, local government theory has largely focused on the balance of policymaking authority between state and local governments, see, e.g., David J. Barron, Reclaiming Home Rule, 116 Harv. L. Rev. 2255 (2003); Richard Briffault, Our Localism: Part I—The Structure of Local Government Law, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (1990); Gerald E. Frug, The City as a Legal Concept, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 1057 (1980), the liminal legal space occupied by local governments, see, e.g., Richard Thompson Ford, The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1841 (1994); Richard C. Schragger, The Limits of Localism, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 371 (2001); Joan C. Williams, The Constitutional Vulnerability of American Local Government: The Politics of City Status in American Law, 1986 Wis. L. Rev. 83, land use, urban planning, and governance problems unique to local government, see, e.g., Michelle Wilde Anderson, The New Minimal Cities, 123 Yale L.J. 1118 (2014); Nestor M. Davidson, Localist Administrative Law, 126 Yale L.J. 564 (2017); David Schleicher, City Unplanning, 122 Yale L.J. 1670 (2013), and federal-state-local relationships in various policy areas, see, e.g., Roderick M. Hills, Jr., Dissecting the State: The Use of Federal Law to Free State and Local Officials from State Legislatures’ Control, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1201 (1999); Cristina M. Rodríguez, The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation, 106 Mich. L. Rev. 567 (2008); Justin Weinstein-Tull, Election Law Federalism, 114 Mich. L. Rev. 747 (2016). This is not, of course, an exhaustive list of categories. ↑
  21. The first exception is misdemeanor criminal process. Scholars have unearthed fascinating (and horrifying) details of how criminal procedure works in the context of minor offenses tried in local courts. See, e.g., Malcolm M. Feeley, The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court (1992); Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing (2018) (describing the “procedural hassle” of criminal procedure in New York local courts); Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (2018); Alexandra Natapoff, Misdemeanors, 85 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1313, 1315 (2012) [hereinafter Natapoff, Misdemeanors] (“Most U.S. convictions are misdemeanors, and they are generated in ways that baldly contradict the standard due process model of criminal adjudication.”). And a deep literature exists that probes the rise of pleas and the process surrounding them. See, e.g., Josh Bowers, Punishing the Innocent, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1117 (2008); George Fisher, Plea Bargaining’s Triumph, 109 Yale L.J. 857 (2000); Thea Johnson, Fictional Pleas, 94 Ind. L.J. 855 (2019); Stephen J. Schulhofer, Plea Bargaining as Disaster, 101 Yale L.J. 1979 (1992).The second exception is the response to Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri. After Brown’s death, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report that detailed the failures of the Ferguson municipal court, including that the court handled criminal charges “not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue.” See U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Civil Rights Div., Investigation of
    the Ferguson Police Department 42 (2015) [hereinafter DOJ Ferguson Report] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/fergu­son_police_department_report.pdf [https://perma.cc/26R9-AB4B]. Scholars have since done illuminating work on local-court reform using Ferguson as a case study. See, e.g., Beth A. Colgan, Lessons from Ferguson on Individual Defense Representation as a Tool of Systemic Reform, 58 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1171 (2017) (describing the many constitutional rights violated by Ferguson’s local-court system and the impact of individual defense counsel on reform efforts); Fred O. Smith, Jr., Abstention in the Time of Ferguson, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 2283 (2018) (arguing that the Younger abstention doctrine precludes meaningful oversight of local courts and governments). ↑
  22. Although there is essentially no academic legal scholarship on local courts as courts, illuminating scholarship does exist on specific issues that take place in local courts, including problems relating to problem-solving and subject-matter courts. See, e.g., Richard C. Boldt, Problem-Solving Courts and Pragmatism, 73 Md. L. Rev. 1120 (2014) (considering how pragmatism informs the judicial process in problem-solving courts); Erin R. Collins, Status Courts, 105 Geo. L.J. 1481 (2017) (describing the promise and pitfalls of local courts that are tailored to certain types of defendants); D. James Greiner, Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak & Jonathan Hennessy, The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in A Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 901 (2013) (empirically evaluating different kinds of legal services in Massachusetts district courts).But in the same way that we don’t consider the study of federal criminal law to satisfy our need to understand federal courts more broadly, neither does the study of specific legal issues that arise in local courts satisfy our need to understand local courts. ↑

Essentially Elective: The Law and Ideology of Restricting Abortion During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has put on full display the physical and doctrinal isolation of abortion from health care more generally.1 1.See, e.g., David J. Garrow, Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade: An Historical Perspective, 62 Alb. L. Rev. 833, 837–40 (1999); B. Jessie Hill, The First Amendment and the Politics of Reproductive Health Care, 50 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 103, 103–04 (2016).Show More In early 2020, several states proclaimed that abortions had to be stopped or delayed for lengthy or indefinite periods of time in order to help fight the pandemic. Those actions provoked litigation seeking emergency relief to keep abortion clinics open.2 2.The states in which litigation occurred are Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Not all of the litigation has resulted in published opinions. I was involved as counsel in the litigation surrounding Ohio’s order and its application to abortion providers. Ohio was the first state to seek to enforce an elective-surgeries order against abortion clinics. Greer Donley, Beatrice A. Chen & Sonya Borrero, The Legal and Medical Necessity of Abortion Care amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, J.L. & Biosciences (forthcoming) (manuscript at 8–9), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?­abstract_id=­3584728 [https://perma.cc/QL85-XHKQ].Show More No similar lawsuits have been necessary to protect access to other medical procedures. So why was abortion singled out for disparate treatment?

This Essay provides an overview of the litigation that ensued in the wake of some states’ attempts to limit abortion access under the authority of executive orders limiting “non-essential,” “non-urgent,” or “elective” medical and surgical procedures. It argues that “abortion exceptionalism”—that is, “the tendency of legislatures and courts to subject abortion to unique, and uniquely burdensome, rules”—came into play in two ways.3 3.Caitlin E. Borgmann, Abortion Exceptionalism and Undue Burden Preemption, 71 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1047, 1048 (2014); Caroline Mala Corbin, Abortion Distortions, 71 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1175, 1177 (2014); Ian Vandewalker, Abortion and Informed Consent: How Biased Counseling Laws Mandate Violations of Medical Ethics, 19 Mich. J. Gender & L. 1, 3 (2012). This exceptionalism permeates abortion doctrine. For example, Professor Caroline Mala Corbin has described how courts set aside traditional free speech principles under the First Amendment when abortion-related speech is involved. Corbin, supra, at 1190–92.Show More First, the COVID-19 crisis allowed anti-abortion officials to rely on the narrow meaning of “elective” in the abortion context, as well as underlying ambiguity about the meaning of “elective,” to argue that abortions are medically unnecessary and can be halted indefinitely during a pandemic. Second, and relatedly, they used the exceptional treatment of abortion and the longstanding ambivalence about the place of abortion within health care to argue that abortion providers’ demands to be treated like every other health care provider under these executive orders was in fact a claim for special treatment. This Essay ends by suggesting that, for long-term protection of abortion rights, abortion must be reframed as a medically necessary and appropriate treatment, and it must be rhetorically re-incorporated into health care more generally.

I. Law: An Overview of COVID-19 Abortion Litigation

A. The Orders

In a handful of states, shifting executive and judicial interpretations of orders banning non-urgent or elective surgeries resulted in a whiplash-inducing series of legal maneuvers and highly unstable circumstances on the ground for those seeking to access or provide abortion services during the COVID-19 pandemic. This controversy arose because, in mid-March 2020, states had begun adopting orders to limit the medical and/or surgical procedures that could be performed during the declared coronavirus emergency.4 4.See, e.g., Ohio Dep’t of Health, Director’s Order for the Management of Non-Essential Surgeries and Procedures Throughout Ohio (Mar. 17, 2020) (rescinded Apr. 30, 2020), https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/resources/public-health-orders/direct­ors-order-non-essential-surgery-3-17-2020 [https://perma.cc/SXX3-2WTE]; Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, Executive Order GA-09 (Mar. 22, 2020) (superseded Apr. 17, 2020 by GA-15), https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA_09_COVID-19_hos­pital_capacity_IMA­GE_03-22-2020.pdf [https://perma.cc/Z876-HNLV]; W. Va. Exec. Dep’t, Executive Order 16-20 (Mar. 31, 2020), https://governor.wv.gov/Documents/­EO%2016-20electivepro­cedures.pdf. [https://perma.cc/KS6A-FQ5E].Show More Broadly speaking, these orders were supported by three justifications: (1) preserving hospital capacity in light of the likely influx of critically ill coronavirus patients; (2) conserving personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks, gloves, and gowns, in short supply due to the pandemic; and (3) reducing the possibility of community spread of the virus by minimizing unnecessary provider-patient interactions.5 5.See sources cited supra note 4; see also, e.g., Robinson v. Att’y Gen., 957 F.3d 1171, 1181 (11th Cir. 2020) (summarizing the state of Alabama’s justifications for its abortion restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic).Show More

The question of how such orders should apply to abortion procedures arose almost immediately. On March 18, 2020, numerous professional organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (“ACOG”), issued a statement affirming that abortion is essential, time-sensitive health care that should not be delayed during a pandemic.6 6.ACOG et al., Joint Statement on Abortion Access During the COVID-19 Outbreak (Mar. 18, 2020), https://www.acog.org/news/news-releases/2020/03/joint-statement-on-abortion-access-during-the-covid-19-outbreak [https://perma.cc/T8CA-K9QS]. This statement was joined by the American Board of Obstetrics & Gynecology, together with the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists, the American Gynecological & Obstetrical Society, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the Society for Academic Specialists in General Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Society of Family Planning, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.Show More That statement noted: “[A] delay of several weeks, or in some cases days, may increase the risks or potentially make [abortion] completely inaccessible. The consequences of being unable to obtain an abortion profoundly impact a person’s life, health, and well-being.”7 7.Id.Show More Similarly, the American Medical Association issued a short statement on March 30, 2020, condemning the politicization of reproductive health care during the pandemic and asserting that “physicians—not politicians—should be the ones deciding which procedures are urgent-emergent and need to be performed, and which ones can wait, in partnership with our patients.”8 8.Am. Med. Ass’n, AMA Statement on Government Interference in Reproductive Health Care (Mar. 30, 2020), https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-statements/ama-statement-government-interference-reproductive-health-care [https://perma.cc/6SAC-PJD5].Show More

Several governors and other officials took the opposite tack, declaring that most “surgical” abortions—and in some cases even medication-induced abortions—must cease, at least temporarily, during the pandemic.9 9.Abortions may be performed medically or surgically. Medication-induced abortions require only the taking of pills and are available through approximately ten weeks of pregnancy. So-called “surgical” abortions, which are available both early and later in pregnancy, are not surgeries in the traditional sense, since they do not usually involve any incision or a sterile opening. See, e.g., Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 136 S. Ct. 2292, 2316 (2016), as revised (June 27, 2016).Show More For example, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves claimed that his executive order banning “elective procedures” would prevent abortions, just like the Texas order it was modeled upon.10 10.Ashton Pittman, Governor Attempts To Ban Mississippi Abortions, Citing Need To Preserve PPE, Jackson Free Press (Apr. 10, 2020), https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/­news/2020/apr/10/governor-bans-abortions-mississippi-claiming-need-/ [https://perma.cc/S­CR5-9PE4].Show More In Oklahoma, the governor declared that all abortions, except emergent procedures or those necessary to avert a serious medical risk, would be suspended under a similar order.11 11.Ryan Sharp & Carmen Forman, Gov. Kevin Stitt Says Abortions Included in Suspended Elective Surgeries, Oklahoman (Mar. 27, 2020), https://oklahoman.com/article/­5658751/governors-office-clarifies-executive-order-to-include-abortions [https://perma.cc/­3CJ3-3326].Show More In Ohio, abortion clinics initially believed they were allowed to continue providing services under the non-essential surgery order, since “time sensitive” procedures were permitted.12 12.Ohio Dep’t of Health, supra note 4.Show More But not long after the order became effective, anti-abortion activists began calling abortion clinics to determine whether they were open, and then advocated with state officials to obtain an interpretation of the order that would halt abortions.13 13.CreatedEqualFilms, #StopTheSpread: Abortion Centers Pose Serious Health Risk of COVID-19 Spread, YouTube (Mar. 20, 2020), https://youtu.be/KKROXMyZ18A [https://perma.cc/LW2J-T5SH].Show More These efforts found success with the Ohio Attorney General, who subsequently issued cease and desist orders to several Ohio clinics.14 14.Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *3 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020).Show More In Ohio, as in several other states, litigation ensued.

B. The Litigation

For the most part, courts decided that it was unconstitutional for states to ban nearly all abortions under the orders that were designed to minimize interpersonal contact, preserve PPE, and manage hospital capacity. District courts in Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas all granted temporary relief against attempts to enforce the orders so as to prevent abortions in all but the most limited circumstances, such as where the pregnant patient’s life is in danger.15 15.Preterm-Cleveland, 2020 WL 1957173, at *17 (granting preliminary injunction); S. Wind Women’s Ctr. LLC v. Stitt, No. 20-CV-00277, 2020 WL 1932900, at *10 (W.D. Okla. Apr. 20, 2020) (granting preliminary injunction); Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, No. 3:15-CV-00705, 2020 WL 1905147, at *7 (M.D. Tenn. Apr. 17, 2020) (granting preliminary injunction), aff’d as modified, 956 F.3d 913 (6th Cir. 2020), modified, No. 3:15-CV-00705, 2020 WL 2026986 (M.D. Tenn. Apr. 27, 2020); Little Rock Family Planning Servs. v. Rutledge, No. 4:19-CV-00449, 2020 WL 1862830, at *11 (E.D. Ark. Apr. 14, 2020) (granting temporary restraining order), order vacated in part, No. 4:19-CV-00449, 2020 WL 2079224 (E.D. Ark. Apr. 22, 2020); Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *16 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020) (granting preliminary injunction); Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. A-20-CV-00323, 2020 WL 1815587, at *7 (W.D. Tex. Apr. 9, 2020) (granting temporary restraining order), mandamus granted, order vacated in part sub nom. In re Abbott, 956 F.3d 696 (5th Cir. 2020).Show More Appeals courts were more of a mixed bag, with the Fifth and Eighth Circuits permitting only a narrow subset of abortions to continue, whereas the Sixth and Eleventh Circuits found a wider range of abortion procedures to be constitutionally protected, even during the pandemic.

The state surgery orders all differed somewhat in their wording and their duration.16 16.A helpful chart can be found in Donley, Chen & Borrero, supra note 2, at 6–8.Show More For example, most orders banned “elective” or “non-essential” surgeries but then listed several criteria to define those terms—generally in such a way that time-sensitive procedures could still go forward. A small number prohibited all “procedures” with the exception of those that are “immediately medically necessary” or those necessary to treat “an emergency medical condition.”17 17.Id.Show More Moreover, most orders referred to surgeries and medical “procedures”; as such they appeared only to limit surgical abortions, although they were interpreted in some states to encompass medication abortion as well.18 18.Id. at 4. In Texas, for instance, the district court issued a temporary restraining order enjoining the state from banning medication abortion during the pandemic. Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. A-20-CV-00323, 2020 WL 1502102, at *4 (W.D. Tex. Mar. 30, 2020). After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the injunction, see In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 779 (5th Cir. 2020), the plaintiff clinics moved for a second temporary restraining order, resulting in a narrower injunction that blocked the order from being applied to, inter alia, medication abortions. Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice, 2020 WL 1815587, at *7. After the Fifth Circuit stayed that injunction, see In re Abbott, 800 F. App’x 293, 296 (5th Cir. 2020), Planned Parenthood asked the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency order vacating the stay as applied to medication abortions. Emergency Application to Justice Alito To Vacate Administrative Stay of Temporary Restraining Order Entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit at 1, Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. 19A1019 (Apr. 11, 2020). Before the Supreme Court could act, the Fifth Circuit dissolved its own stay only as applied to medication abortions, finding that it was unclear whether the Governor’s order was meant to prohibit them. In re Abbott, 809 F. App’x 200, 202–03 (5th Cir. 2020). Subsequently, however, that same court issued an opinion holding the second temporary restraining order invalid and allowing the state to prohibit all abortions (including medication abortions), except for women whose pregnancies were close to the legal limit for obtaining a pre-viability abortion. Abbott, 956 F.3d at 724.Show More Some orders were designed to stay in effect until they were rescinded, whereas others had set expiration dates.19 19.Compare, e.g., La. Dep’t of Health, Healthcare Facility Notice/Order #2020-COVID19-All-007, at 2 (Mar. 21, 2020), http://ldh.la.gov/assets/oph/Coronavirus/resources/­providers/LDH-UPDATED-Notice-Med-Surg-Procedures32120.pdf [https://perma.cc/K94T-YB6S] (stating the order would remain in effect “until further notice”), and Ohio Dep’t of Health, supra note 4 (stating the order would remain in effect until the state of emergency no longer exists or the order is rescinded or modified), with Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, supra note 4 (specifying an expiration date of Apr. 21, 2020).Show More

Where states interpreted their orders to prohibit abortion, courts’ differing understandings and applications of the relevant doctrinal framework dictated whether those abortion bans were found to be constitutional. In particular, courts differed in how they understood the key Supreme Court precedent pertaining to the government’s public health powers in Jacobson v. Massachusetts,20 20.197 U.S. 11, 22–23 (1905).Show More and its interaction with the key abortion-rights precedents in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey21 21.505 U.S. 833, 844–45 (1992).Show More and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.22 22.136 S. Ct. 2292, 2309–10 (2016).Show More Casey, of course, stands for the proposition that the state may not prevent a pregnant person from accessing abortion altogether before viability, nor may it impose an “undue burden” on the ability to do so.23 23.Casey, 505 U.S. at 872–74; see also Whole Woman’s Health, 136 S. Ct. at 2309 (same).Show More Whole Woman’s Health clarified that courts applying this standard should balance the asserted health benefits of the law against the law’s burdens on abortion access; if the benefits are outweighed by the burdens, then the burden is “undue.”24 24.Whole Woman’s Health, 136 S. Ct. at 2309. In June Medical Services,LLC v. Russo, 140 S. Ct. 2103 (2020), the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that was virtually identical to the Texas law at issue in Whole Woman’s Health. Id. at __ (slip op. at 40). In so doing, a four-Justice plurality applied the balancing test set forth in Whole Woman’s Health. Id. at __ (slip op. at 2–3). Chief Justice Roberts, who provided the critical fifth vote, concurred separately and questioned the validity of requiring courts to consider an abortion restriction’s benefits in relation to its burdens. Id. at __ (slip op. at 2) (Roberts, C.J., concurring). Thus, the balancing test set forth in Whole Woman’s Health remains intact for now, although there are clearly five Justices—Chief Justice Roberts plus the four other conservative Justices—who would like to abandon it. See id. at __ (slip op. at 1–2) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting).Show More In addition, courts are not to defer uncritically to legislatures’ findings regarding the medical benefits of a particular law.25 25.Whole Woman’s Health, 136 S. Ct. at 2310.Show More

Seemingly uncomfortable with engaging in business as usual during a public health crisis, the courts also turned to Jacobson, a 1905 Supreme Court case involving a constitutional challenge to Massachusetts’s compulsory smallpox vaccination law. In Jacobson, the Court upheld the vaccination requirement, stating that courts normally lack “power . . . to review legislative action in respect of a matter affecting the general welfare,” except if the action “has no real or substantial relation to” public health, morals, or safety, or if the action “is, beyond all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights secured by the [Constitution].”26 26.Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 31 (1905).Show More They treated Jacobson, which appears to apply highly deferential review to state action, as providing relevant doctrinal principles for defining the scope of constitutional rights during a public health emergency.

However, it is not at all clear that Jacobson, a Lochner-era case considering the limits of the state’s police powers, has any application where an individual constitutional right is involved. Nor does it actually appear to be a case about emergency powers. The central question in Jacobson—which was decided long before the footnote in United States v. Carolene Products Co. urging heightened scrutiny for laws affecting fundamental rights27 27.304 U.S. 144, 152–53 n.4 (1938).Show More and long before the Court recognized an individual right to bodily integrity and decisional autonomy—was simply whether a compulsory smallpox vaccination requirement fell within the scope of state power. In Jacobson, the Court was not faced with any specific claim of an individual constitutional right—just a generic appeal to Fourteenth-Amendment “liberty.”28 28.Jacobson, 197 U.S. at 24, 26.Show More At the turn of the twentieth century, state laws were often subject to scrutiny on the ground that they violated individual liberty and by the same token exceeded the extent of the state’s power to legislate in the interest of health or safety;29 29.See, e.g., Wendy E. Parmet, From Slaughter-House to Lochner: The Rise and Fall of the Constitutionalization of Public Health, 40 Am. J. Legal Hist. 476, 483 (1996) (“To [Justice Samuel] Miller, the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit states from exercising their police power. It only forbid them from exceeding that power.”); id. at 493 (“[T]he Fourteenth Amendment challenges [around the turn of the twentieth century] asserted . . . that the states were denying individual freedom and acting beyond the purview of government.”).Show More Lochner-era substantive due process challenges thus generally asserted that a particular law was invalid because it was not actually a health law, or because it did not actually advance the state’s interest in health and safety.30 30.See, e.g., Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 58 (1905).Show More This claim did not turn at all on whether the law conflicted with the claimant’s constitutional rights.

In addition, the scrutiny that the Court applied to the vaccination law in Jacobson was arguably stricter than its deferential language indicated.31 31.Scott Burris, Rationality Review and the Politics of Public Health, 34 Vill. L. Rev. 933, 961 (1989). Indeed, the application of fairly rigorous review in fact, while using the language of rational basis review, is arguably the hallmark of cases from the Lochner era. See David N. Mayer, The Myth of “Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism”: Liberty of Contract During the Lochner Era, 36 Hastings Const. L.Q. 217, 262 (2009).Show More As Professor Scott Burris has pointed out, the Jacobson Court made reference to the wide and deep medical consensus around the safety and efficacy of vaccination, citing two pages’ worth of medical authority to that effect, in support of its finding that compulsory vaccination was an appropriate and legitimate health measure.32 32.Burris, supra note 31, at 961–62.Show More Indeed, Jacobson has often been treated as a precedent about the limits on states’ public health powers, not a vindication of unlimited state emergency powers.33 33.James G. Hodge, Jr. & Lawrence O. Gostin, School Vaccination Requirements: Historical, Social, and Legal Perspectives, 90 Ky. L.J. 831, 856–57 (2002) (deriving from Jacobson four limitations on the power of states to act in the interest of public health);cf. Parmet, supra note 29, at 493 (noting that “the concept of the police power” at the time of Jacobson “was used not only to define state power, but to limit it in the name of individual freedom”).Show More Moreover, if Jacobson was a case about the state’s expansive power in emergencies, as the states claimed in asserting their authority to ban or delay abortions in a public health emergency, it is not clear why vaccination mandates have continued to be upheld on Jacobson’s authority more than a century later, regardless of whether the mandate addresses an actual public health emergency.34 34.For example, in Caviezel v. Great Neck Pub. Sch., 500 F. App’x 16 (2d Cir. 2012), the Second Circuit Court of Appeals applied Jacobson to uphold a general vaccination requirement for public schooling and observed that the case generally demonstrates that the state interest in protecting against communicable disease outweighs the individual’s interest in refusing unwanted medical interventions. Id. at 19 (citing Cruzan ex rel. Cruzan v. Dir., Mo. Dep’t of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 278 (1990)); see also Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174, 176 (1922) (relying on Jacobson for the proposition that “compulsory vaccination” is within a state’s “police power”); Wendy E. Parmet, Rediscovering Jacobson in the Era of COVID-19, 100 B.U. L. Rev. Online 117, 127, 130–31 (2020) (demonstrating that Jacobson has not been applied, and was not meant to apply, only to emergencies or outbreaks).Show More

Nonetheless, all of the courts considering challenges to abortion restrictions during the pandemic applied Jacobson to some degree. Some courts appeared to understand Jacobson’s language as requiring a higher showing of unconstitutionality and a greater mismatch between means and ends than if only Casey and Whole Woman’s Health applied. For example, the Fifth Circuit treated Jacobson as requiring a form of arbitrariness review—a standard associated with rational basis scrutiny.35 35.In re Abbott, 956 F.3d 696, 704–05, 716 (5th Cir. 2020); In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 784 (5th Cir. 2020); see also Parmet, supranote 34, at 118 (noting that the Fifth Circuit in Abbott treated Jacobson as “requir[ing] courts to limit their review of constitutional rights during a public health emergency”).Show More The Eighth Circuit also adopted this framework, suggesting that even an otherwise unconstitutional ban on all surgical abortions before viability might be constitutional in the context of a public health crisis.36 36.In re Rutledge, 956 F.3d 1018, 1027, 1030 (8th Cir. 2020).Show More Similarly, the dissenting judge in the Sixth Circuit case read the “basic principle of Jacobson” to be “that states may respond to emergencies in the face of substantive-due-process rights, so long as they act reasonably and don’t single out specific rights or persons for disfavored treatment.”37 37.Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 934 (6th Cir. 2020) (Thapar, J., dissenting). Interestingly, in enjoining Kentucky’s ban on drive-in religious services during the pandemic, the Sixth Circuit glided past Jacobson without applying, or in fact even mentioning, the language that appeared to require a less stringent level of review. In fact, the court summed up the only paragraph in which it cited Jacobson with the Delphic assertion: “While the law may take periodic naps during a pandemic, we will not let it sleep through one.” Maryville Baptist Church, Inc. v. Beshear, 957 F.3d 610, 615 (6th Cir. 2020). Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a church’s request for emergency relief against California’s ban on larger in-person worship ceremonies. Concurring in the denial, Chief Justice Roberts cited Jacobson to suggest that the need for particular measures during a pandemic should be left primarily to the political process. S. Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, 140 S. Ct. 1613, 1613 (2020) (Roberts, C.J., concurring). Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, dissented from the denial without so much as mentioning Jacobson. Id. at 1614–15 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting).Show More Judged against the correct understanding of Jacobson in its historical context, however, this treatment of the case as requiring an elevated showing of unconstitutionality or a less strict form of review for state orders in public health emergencies appears remarkably anachronistic.

On the other hand, the Sixth and Eleventh Circuits held that Jacobson’s language must be reconciled with the more recent cases identifying a constitutional right to access abortion. Under this framework, those courts held that the orders violated patients’ rights to access abortion.38 38.Adams & Boyle, 956 F.3d at 927(“[W]e will not countenance . . . the notion that COVID-19 has somehow demoted Roe and Casey to second-class rights, enforceable against only the most extreme and outlandish violations.”); Robinson v. Att’y Gen., 957 F.3d 1171, 1182–83 (11th Cir. 2020).Show More Perhaps implicitly recognizing that Casey and Whole Woman’s Health already required the court to balance state interests against individual rights, those courts focused on determining whether the burdens of the orders outweighed their benefits. This balancing test already required consideration of whether, to echo the language of Jacobson, the orders lacked a “substantial relation to” the public health goals they sought to advance.39 39.Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 19 (1905).Show More In other words, as the Sixth Circuit explained, “context matters.”40 40.Adams & Boyle, 956 F.3d at 927.Show More In the context of a pandemic, the Whole Woman’s Health standard for deciding whether a burden is “undue” already allows courts to take into account the urgency and time-sensitivity of the state’s interests in preserving hospital capacity, maintaining the supply of PPE, and limiting in-person contact. The court must then balance those benefits against the burden on the individual’s right to access abortion—which, here, amounts to a total ban on abortion for the (possibly indefinite) duration of the orders.

Regardless of whether Jacobson’s language should apply, courts should have concluded that the elective surgery orders were unconstitutional as applied to abortion. These orders could be viewed as either completely banning abortion or as delaying individual abortions for a period of weeks or more. Viewed as bans on abortion, the orders would unquestionably be unconstitutional; neither the Supreme Court nor any federal appellate court has, since Roe v. Wade,41 41.410 U.S. 113 (1973).Show More ever upheld a flat-out ban on abortion (as opposed to a regulation). Perhaps in order to avoid this clear precedent, some states argued that their orders required all abortions to be delayed during the pandemic except if the patient was nearing the gestational limit for obtaining a legal abortion (usually approximately 22–24 weeks of pregnancy).42 42.See, e.g., Adams & Boyle, 956 F.3d at 922; In re Abbott, 800 F. App’x 293, 296 (5th Cir. 2020).Show More Even understood as delays, however, the orders would unquestionably and palpably amount to undue burdens on the abortion right under Casey and Whole Woman’s Health. Casey upheld a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions, the purpose of which was to ensure women are able to reflect on their decisions, but found the constitutionality of that provision to be a “closer question” than the constitutionality of other restrictions.43 43.Planned Parenthood of Se. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 885 (1992).Show More Given that the delays required by the COVID-19 pandemic would last weeks or longer, as explained below, the burdens on abortion access imposed by those bans outweigh the benefits by a substantial margin.

Pregnancy progresses inevitably and relatively quickly, and while abortion is an extremely safe procedure, the risks associated with abortion increase later in the pregnancy—approximately 38% per week of delay.44 44.Linda A. Bartlett, Cynthia J. Berg, Holly B. Shulman, Suzanne B. Zane, Clarice A. Green, Sara Whitehead & Hani K. Atrash, Risk Factors for Legal Induced Abortion-Related Mortality in the United States, 103 Obstetrics & Gynecology 729, 731 (2004). Carrying a pregnancy to term—a process that also generally involves medical intervention—is several times riskier than abortion; thus, arguably all abortions avert serious health risks. See Suzanne Zane, Andreea A. Creanga, Cynthia J. Berg, Karen Pazol, Danielle B. Suchdev, Denise J. Jamieson & William M. Callaghan, Abortion-Related Mortality in the United States 1998–2010, 126 Obstetrics & Gynecology 258, 264 (2015), https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/­2015/08000/Abortion_­Related_Mortality_in_the_United_States_.6.aspx [https://perma.cc/­D8C3-3XMH]; CDC, Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System 2, https://www.cdc.gov/­reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/pregnancy-mortality-surveillance-system.htm [https://perma.cc/4A6P-9GNH].Show More In addition, more complex surgical procedures are required at later gestational stages, sometimes even necessitating surgical visits on two separate days to complete.45 45.Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *7 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020); Bartlett et al., supra note 44, at 735.Show More Thus, at a minimum, the health risks are sufficiently grave if delaying an abortion would require a later and riskier procedure. In addition, however, every week of delay imposes unnecessary and therefore unacceptable health risks—especially since most courts were operating on the understanding that any patient who wanted an abortion had a right to receive one eventually, and thus that every abortion would still occur, but much later in the pregnancy.46 46.See sources cited supra note 42.Show More The increased health risks to patients are therefore a serious burden to be weighed against the questionable benefits.

Those benefits were purported to be saving PPE, preserving hospital capacity, and minimizing personal contact. But given that under the states’ positions, pregnant people would be able to receive abortions eventually—just later than they wished to—these interests would not be served. The later procedures would use just as much or more PPE; the personal contact would still occur, and hospitalization—while always unlikely with an abortion, which is a safe outpatient procedure—would if anything be more likely the longer the person remained pregnant and the later and more complicated the abortion procedure became. Thus, the Sixth and Eleventh Circuits correctly held that the COVID abortion bans lacked a “substantial relation” to their public health goals and were “plain[ly and] palpab[ly]” unconstitutional under Whole Woman’s Health.47 47.Robinson v. Att’y Gen., 957 F.3d 1171, 1182 (11th Cir. 2020) (quoting Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 31 (1905)).Show More

Ultimately, most of the litigation surrounding non-essential surgery orders has been mooted or otherwise fizzled out. Many states’ orders expired or else were replaced by more lenient orders that clearly allowed abortions to proceed along with most other outpatient surgeries.48 48.See, e.g., Ohio Dep’t of Health, Director’s Stay Safe Ohio Order 3 (Apr. 30, 2020), https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/static/publicorders/Directors-Stay-Safe-Ohio-Order.pdf [https://perma.cc/JD5F-CKMC]; Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, Executive Order GA-15 (Apr. 17, 2020), https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA-15_hospital_capacity_COVID-19_TRANS_04-17-2020.pdf [https://perma.cc/LYB7-L5T7] (allowing non-medically necessary surgeries to proceed if they would not deplete hospital capacity or PPE). One notable exception is Arkansas, which replaced its stringent ban on abortions not “necessary to protect the life or health of the patient” with an order, adopted April 27, 2020, allowing virtually all “elective” surgeries to proceed but requiring even asymptomatic patients to provide a negative test result for COVID-19 within 48 hours of the surgery. Although some health care facilities presumably have access to such tests, this requirement proved nearly impossible for abortion clinics to meet. Little Rock Family Planning Servs. v. Rutledge, No. 4:20-CV-00470, 2020 WL 2240105, at *4–5 (E.D. Ark. May 7, 2020).Show More Thus, the legal issue has died down for now, although litigation will likely recur if a new wave of COVID cases leads to a short supply of PPE and hospital beds.49 49.In Texas, for example, the Governor rolled back the state’s reopening and imposed new restrictions on elective surgeries, although the new elective surgeries order appears not to apply to abortions. Emma Platoff, Texas Bans Elective Surgeries in More than 100 Counties as Coronavirus Hospitalizations Keep Climbing, Tex. Tribune (July 9, 2020), https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/09/texas-coronavirus-hospitalizations-elective-surger­ies/ [https://perma.cc/TS6H-8EM7]. Other states, too, have begun shutting down again in response to spikes in COVID-19 infection rates. See Jasmine C. Lee, Sarah Mervosh, Yuriria Avila, Barbara Harvey & Alex Leeds Matthews, See How All 50 States Are Reopening (and Closing Again), N.Y. Times (July 23, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/­2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html [https://perma.cc/SD6T-NW7X].Show More But beyond its possible relevance to future litigation, the case law arising out of the abortion restrictions adopted during the pandemic contains useful lessons about the rhetorical framing of abortion even during non-pandemic times.

II. Ideology: The Logic Behind the COVID Abortion Bans

The fight over abortion access during the COVID-19 pandemic has roots that stretch back well before 2020. Since the Supreme Court recognized a fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy in Roe v. Wade, a series of historical contingencies and intentional choices has led to abortions being provided primarily in freestanding clinics that are separate from “mainstream” medical institutions such as hospitals and physicians’ offices. This result has coincided with the development of a unique doctrinal framework for analyzing the constitutionality of abortion restrictions that is largely dissimilar to the framework for analyzing any other constitutional right, leading to the perception that abortion is sui generis in constitutional law.50 50.I discuss this phenomenon in a forthcoming article. B. Jessie Hill, The Geography of Abortion Rights, 109 Geo. L.J. (forthcoming 2021) (manuscript at 20–21, 21 n.97) (on file with author).Show More This evolution has produced two kinds of abortion exceptionalism that make a recognizable appearance in the COVID abortion ban cases: considering most abortions to be elective, unlike comparable medical procedures, and framing abortion providers’ requests for equal treatment as requests for special treatment. As I discuss in Part III, these phenomena are problematic for abortion doctrine, both within the pandemic-orders context and outside of it.

A. “Elective” Abortion

Most states’ orders temporarily banned “elective” or “non-essential” surgeries.51 51.The states temporarily banning “elective” surgeries were Arkansas, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Arkansas Dep’t of Health, ADH Directive on Elective Surgeries (Apr. 3, 2020) (superseded Apr. 27, 2020), https://www.healthy.arkansas.gov/­images/uploads/pdf/Elective_Procedure_Directive_April_3.pdf [https://perma.cc/8WBP-K2K2]; Governor Kimberly K. Reynolds, Proclamation of Disaster Emergency (Mar. 26, 2020) (superseded Apr. 24, 2020), https://governor.iowa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/­Public%20Health%20Proclamation%20-%202020.03.26.pdf [https://perma.cc/KDW8-CZ­AW]; Ohio Dep’t of Health, Director’s Order for the Management of Non-Essential Surgeries and Procedures Throughout Ohio (Mar. 17, 2020) (rescinded Apr. 30, 2020), https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/resources/public-health-orders/direc­tors-order-non-essential-surgery-3-17-2020 [https://perma.cc/ZCT8-5GDU]; Okla. Exec. Order 2020-07 (Fourth Amended) (Mar. 24, 2020), https://www.sos.ok.gov/documents/­executive/1919.pdf [https://perma.cc/EAG4-KHP6]; Tenn. Exec. Order 25 (Apr. 8, 2020) (expired Apr. 30, 2020), https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/pub/execorders/exec-orders-lee25.pdf [https://perma.cc/P5L3-N2SJ].Show More Those terms were then further defined in the orders. Yet, because of this wording, anti-abortion officials were able to exploit a particular popular understanding of electiveness in the abortion context that would not apply to other medical procedures.

Strictly speaking, in medical terminology an “elective” surgery is simply one that can be scheduled ahead of time, as opposed to one that is emergently performed.52 52.See, e.g., Michelle J. Bayefsky, Deborah Bartz & Katie L. Watson, Abortion During the Covid-19 Pandemic—Ensuring Access to an Essential Health Service, 382 New Eng. J. Med. e47(1), e47(2) (2020); Benjamin Elliot Yelnosky Smith, Deborah Bartz, Alisa B. Goldberg & Elizabeth Janiak, “Without Any Indication”: Stigma and a Hidden Curriculum Within Medical Students’ Discussion of Elective Abortion, 214 Soc. Sci. & Med. 26, 27 (2018) (“The word ‘elective’ has had a consistent medical meaning since as early as 1936 when it was used to describe surgeries that could be planned rather than done emergently.”).Show More In popular parlance, by contrast, elective surgery is often understood to refer to procedures that are optional or not medically necessary, such as cosmetic surgery.53 53.Smith et al.,supra note 52, at 27.Show More Yet it does not appear that either meaning was intended by those orders banning “elective” surgeries. Instead, the orders often outlined specific factors to define what constitutes essential, non-elective surgery. Generally, those factors included time sensitivity and aggravation of an underlying condition—thus allowing a range of procedures to go forward that would not necessarily qualify as emergent.54 54.See, e.g., Governor Kimberly K. Reynolds, supra note 51; Ohio Dep’t of Health, supra note 4. Those states that did not use the term “elective” applied a variety of standards to identify the procedures that would be banned. Alabama initially banned “elective” procedures but then amended that order to permit only those procedures “necessary to treat an emergency medical condition” or “necessary to avoid serious harm from an underlying condition or disease, or necessary as part of a patient’s ongoing and active treatment.” Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *2 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020) (quoting Ala. Dep’t of Pub. Health, Order of the State Health Officer Suspending Certain Public Gatherings due to Risk of Infection by COVID-19 (Mar. 27, 2020) (internal quotation marks omitted)). In Texas, the order allowed procedures to go forward if the patient would otherwise “be at risk for serious adverse medical consequences or death, as determined by the patient’s physician.” Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, supra note 4.Show More

As used in the abortion context, the term “elective” has yet another meaning, which state officials appeared to rely upon in claiming they should not be performed during the pandemic. In the abortion context, “elective” almost always refers to those abortions that are not performed for a reason relating to a separate or underlying medical condition of the pregnant person or the fetus.55 55.Smith et al., supra note 52, at 27; Katie Watson, Why We Should Stop Using the Term “Elective Abortion”, 20 AMA J. Ethics 1175, 1176 (2018).Show More Indeed, one study involving medical students planning to practice obstetrics and gynecology found that they used the term “elective” to contrast with medically necessary or medically indicated, by which they meant an abortion due to fetal anomaly or a separate health condition of the pregnant woman.56 56.See Smith et al., supra note 52, at 29. Similarly, in a recent case involving a challenge to an ordinance that attempted to exclude surgical abortion clinics from operating within a particular city, the parties disputed whether abortion services fell within a zoning provision allowing for facilities providing outpatient services that were “therapeutic, preventative or correctional.” FemHealth USA, Inc. v. City of Mount Juliet, No. 3:19-CV-01141, 2020 WL 2098234, at *4 (M.D. Tenn. May 1, 2020). Drawing a distinction between therapeutic medical procedures and those it presumably deemed elective, the City claimed “abortion . . . is not preventative. It is not correctional. There are therapeutic abortions where the life or health of the mother is at risk.” City of Mount Juliet’s Response to Motion for Preliminary Injunction at 11, FemHealth USA, Inc. v. City of Mount Juliet, 2020 WL 2098234 (M.D. Tenn. Feb. 28, 2020) (No. 3:19-CV-01141).Show More

On this definition of electiveness, the overwhelming majority of abortions in the U.S. are elective. In a 2005 study, only 12% of women indicated that they were choosing abortion at least partially because of a possible health issue, and only 4% indicated that it was the most important reason.57 57.Lawrence B. Finer, Lori F. Frohwirth, Lindsay A. Dauphinee, Susheela Singh & Ann M. Moore, Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives, 37 Persp. on Sexual & Reprod. Health 110, 112–14 (2005).Show More Another 13% indicated an issue with the health of the fetus factored into the decision, with only 3% stating it was the most important reason.58 58.Id. Of course, as one scholar has pointed out, in another sense, “[e]very abortion is elective,” since even patients facing serious health risks can choose whether to have the procedure or undergo the risks to their health. Watson, supra note 55, at 1176.Show More Instead, most women choose abortion in response to an unintended pregnancy for reasons related to their unreadiness or inability to parent a child (or an additional child).59 59.Finer et al., supra note 57, at 110–12.Show More

This problematic definition of “elective” abortion is a form of abortion exceptionalism, as it uniquely stigmatizes the abortion decision and adopts a concept of electiveness that would not apply to other surgeries. The notion that abortions chosen for particular reasons are somehow optional or non-therapeutic implies that the natural and expected course for all women and pregnant people is parenthood and that terminating a pregnancy is a “choice,” but continuing one is not. (We do not, for example, generally speak of elective childbirth.) Indeed, the common rhetorical framing—or euphemizing—of the right to terminate a pregnancy as the “right to choose” may contribute to this unspoken understanding of abortion as a “choice.”60 60.Thanks to Jonathan Entin for pointing this out.Show More This framing stigmatizes the decision to end a pregnancy, while failing to apply similar scrutiny to the decision to become a parent. And it assumes that an abortion is acceptable if it results from a wanted pregnancy “gone wrong,” but not if it results from a mistake or a so-called “social” reason.61 61.See Smith et al., supra note 52, at 29.Show More As Professor Katie Watson puts it, this framing valorizes “women who accept the social norms that women are meant to be mothers and that women cannot have sex solely for pleasure instead of for procreation.”62 62.Watson, supra note 55, at 1178.Show More As she further points out, we do not generally label knee replacement surgery, for example, as “elective” simply because it is a way of resisting the natural deterioration of the knee cartilage, and we do not pass judgment on the decision to seek that surgery or the reasons for it, even if certain individual choices, such as deciding to play sports, contributed to the patient’s predicament.63 63.Id.at 1175.Show More Thus, using the concept of “elective” abortion in its popular sense further emphasizes the separateness of abortion from health care generally and treats it as a moral choice, rather than as a medical decision.64 64.Id.; see also Smith et al., supra note 52, at 26 (“‘Elective’ negatively marked and isolated some abortions, and participants used the term to convey judgement about patients’ social and reproductive histories.”).Show More

Nonetheless, by relying on the meaning that the term “elective” usually has when it is applied to abortion, some states were able to clamp down on abortion access. In Texas and Oklahoma, for example, the state took the position that only abortions provided to avert a “medical emergency” could go forward.65 65.S. Wind Women’s Ctr. LLC v. Stitt, No. 20-CV-00277, 2020 WL 1932900, at *3 (W.D. Okla. Apr. 20, 2020); Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. A-20-CV-00323, 2020 WL 1815587, at *2 (W.D. Tex. Apr. 9, 2020).Show More Similarly, in Tennessee, the order was interpreted to ban all surgical abortions except those “required to . . . prevent rapid deterioration or serious adverse consequences to a patient’s physical condition.”66 66.Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 931 (6th Cir. 2020) (Thapar, J., dissenting).Show More In Ohio, the state argued that the order allowed surgical abortions only to protect the patient’s life or health, or those that were close to the legal limit for performing a pre-viability abortion.67 67.Combined Emergency Motion for Stay Pending Appeal and Merits Brief at 12–13, Yost v. Preterm-Cleveland, No. 20-3365 (6th Cir. Apr. 1, 2020).Show More Similarly, the Eighth Circuit held that because medication abortions were allowed to proceed and because the clinics had not identified how many women would actually be affected by the ban (and therefore could not quantify the burden on abortion access), the “right to elective abortion”—meaning the right to reproductive autonomy—had not been clearly violated.68 68.In re Rutledge, 956 F.3d 1018, 1028–32 (8th Cir. 2020).Show More

In addition to exploiting this unique definition of electiveness, anti-abortion officials sometimes relied upon it to create uncertainty about the application of state orders in a way that put abortion clinics in a bind. In a number of cases, officials threatened enforcement actions while refusing to tell abortion clinics which abortions the state considered to be “elective” or medically unnecessary. In the case of Ohio, even after the clinics brought suit, the state refused to explain which abortions were permissible under the order—despite the fact that criminal penalties attached to a violation of the surgery order.69 69.Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *4 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020). The state had also sent health inspectors to examine the records of three abortion clinics but never revealed whether it found any violations of the orders. Id.Show More Similarly, in Alabama, the district court observed that the meaning of the state’s order with respect to abortion “was not immediately clear,” and that, “[i]n part because abortion providers in Alabama operate in an atmosphere of hostility, the [clinics] sought clarification of whether the restrictions allow the continued performance of abortions.”70 70.Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *2 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020).Show More The court further noted that “[r]epeated efforts to clarify the application of the medical restrictions to abortion, including by the plaintiffs and by [the] court . . . yielded multiple inconsistent interpretations” by the state.71 71.Id.Show More This refusal to provide clarity left the clinics vulnerable to various civil and criminal sanctions and naturally had a chilling effect on their willingness to perform abortions.

Moreover, even in those states that specified a narrow understanding of which abortions qualified as medically necessary or non-elective, it was not self-evident what constituted a threat to a patient’s “health” or a “serious adverse consequence[] to a patient’s physical condition” in the context of abortion.72 72.Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 931 (6th Cir. 2020) (Thapar, J., dissenting).Show More For example, is the significantly increased risk brought about by any meaningful delay enough to qualify under this language?73 73.See supra note 44 and accompanying text.Show More Or is something more required? Even outside the reproductive health context, medical necessity is a poorly defined concept that is often left to individual physicians to apply.74 74.B. Jessie Hill, What Is the Meaning of Health? Constitutional Implications of Defining “Medical Necessity” and “Essential Health Benefits” Under the Affordable Care Act, 38 Am. J.L. & Med. 445, 450–57 (2012); Wendy K. Mariner, Patients’ Rights After Health Care Reform: Who Decides What Is Medically Necessary?, 84 Am. J. Pub. Health 1515, 1516–17 (1994).Show More The states that applied elective surgery bans to prohibit most or nearly all abortions—all of which had previously exhibited hostility to abortion rights—were able to exploit this underlying uncertainty.

B. “Exempting” Abortion

The abortion-specific understandings of electiveness and medical necessity also led some courts to see the plaintiffs’ claims for equal treatment with other health care providers as asking for an exemption under the orders. This framing of requests for equal treatment as requests for special treatment was also a form of abortion exceptionalism.75 75.See sources cited supra note 3 and accompanying text.Show More Because abortion is understood as uniquely medically unnecessary or optional, in a way that other medical procedures are not, the requests of abortion providers to be treated like other physicians providing essential services was seen as aberrational.

Primarily, this reversal of plaintiffs’ claims for equal treatment took the form of state officials declining to afford abortion providers the sort of deference that other medical professionals likely would receive when deciding whether a surgery should proceed under the order. For example, in Alabama, state officials initially interpreted the surgery order to allow abortions only where necessary to preserve the life or health of the woman.76 76.Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *3 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020).Show More After the state changed its position, the district court sought an assurance that “[t]he reasonable medical judgment of abortion providers will be treated with the same respect and deference as the judgments of other medical providers,” and that “[t]he decisions will not be singled out for adverse consequences because the services in question are abortions or abortion-related.”77 77.Id. at *4.Show More The state resisted this formulation, however, and refused to agree not to second-guess abortion providers’ decisions.78 78.Id. at *5.Show More Similarly, in Ohio, the providers asked the court “for their case-by-case determinations regarding the essential nature of an abortion procedure to be treated the same as other Ohio healthcare professionals’ determinations regarding the essential nature of other procedures.”79 79.Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *16 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020).Show More This equal treatment clearly had not been provided. For example, the state contended it had received complaints about three abortion clinics purportedly performing elective surgeries, as well as a similar complaint about a urology clinic. Yet, while Ohio sent inspectors to review the surgery records of the abortion clinics, there was no evidence it had taken any steps to investigate the urology clinic.80 80.Id. at *16 n.19.Show More In Texas, the state highlighted its tendency to view abortion as sui generis among medical procedures when answering a question posed to it in writing by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Trying to determine whether medication-only abortion was covered by the state order banning non-medically necessary procedures, the court asked the parties to explain “[w]hat medical acts should be considered analogous to medication abortion.”81 81.Petitioners’ Letter Brief at 4, In re Abbott, No. 20-50296 (5th Cir. Apr. 13, 2020).Show More The State of Texas answered: “Medication abortions are unique. Petitioners are unaware of other procedures that involve the use of medication to achieve a medical result that is not tied to treating or managing a disease or harmful condition.”82 82.Id.Show More

Differential treatment of abortion providers is normalized by the stigma that permeates abortion provision, treats abortion services as outside of mainstream health care, and assumes almost all abortions are, by default, elective. Thus, the providers’ requests to be allowed to make their own determinations whether a particular surgery for a particular patient qualified as essential and non-elective were cast by states, and some courts, as requests for “blanket exemption[s].”83 83.Preterm-Cleveland, 2020 WL 1957173, at *9; see also Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 928 (6th Cir. 2020) (“[T]he State suggests that if we permit this one exemption, surely the joint-replacement surgeons, the cataract-removal specialists, and every other medical provider affected by EO-25’s bar on elective procedures will follow . . . .”); In re Rutledge, 956 F.3d 1018, 1032 (8th Cir. 2020) (stating that the district court’s order allowing abortions to proceed during the pandemic “bestow[ed] on [surgical] abortion providers a blanket exemption from a generally-applicable emergency public health measure” (quoting In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 795 (5th Cir. 2020))). At the same time, abortion providers were uniquely disabled in many cases from pursuing measures that would allow them to conserve PPE and limit exposure, such as using telemedicine for providing medication abortion. While telemedicine has been available and encouraged during the pandemic for most procedures, state laws requiring in-person visits for abortion inhibited its expansion to abortion services. See Ushma D. Upadhyay & Daniel Grossman, Telemedicine for Medication Abortion, 100 Contraception 351, 351 (2019).Show More In fact, in In re Rutledge, this abortion exceptionalism led the Eighth Circuit down a perplexingly incorrect doctrinal path. In determining whether Arkansas’s surgery order could be mobilized to ban all surgical abortions in the state, the court declined to consider whether the order violated the Constitution as applied to abortion; instead, it only considered whether the directive itself—requiring suspension of all “elective” surgeries—was valid.84 84.Rutledge, 956 F.3d at 1028–29.Show More The court asserted that it could not “take a piecemeal approach and scrutinize individual surgical procedures or otherwise create an exception for particular providers, such as those performing non-emergency, surgical abortions.”85 85.Id. at 1029 (emphasis added).Show More Not only does this formulation label nearly all abortions elective, but it also ignores the existence of the fundamental right to abortion and incorrectly applies Supreme Court precedent. Specifically, it ignores case law requiring courts to weigh the benefits and burdens of all restrictions on abortion as applied to abortion patients and providers—even those arising from laws that do not single out abortion but instead apply to other procedures as well. For example, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court considered whether Texas’s surgical-center law unduly burdened abortion access, although that law applied to (and remained valid as applied to) facilities other than abortion clinics.86 86.136 S. Ct. 2292, 2299, 2314 (2016), as revised (June 27, 2016); see also Women’s Med. Prof’l Corp. v. Baird, 438 F.3d 595, 603 (6th Cir. 2006) (“The generally applicable and neutral regulation in this case (the transfer agreement requirement) affects an abortion clinic, which is unable to satisfy the regulation’s requirements. Therefore, Casey and other relevant case law regarding state restrictions on abortion apply.”);Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa, Inc. v. Atchison, 126 F.3d 1042, 1048 (8th Cir. 1997) (“[B]y requiring the plaintiff to undergo the CON review process, the defendants would impose a substantial and unconstitutional burden on the right of access to abortion.”).Show More But when the Eighth Circuit balanced benefits and burdens, it considered the benefits of the surgery order generally rather than with respect to abortion, stating that “the purpose of the . . . directive is to delay all non-emergency surgeries so that the State may conserve its finite amount of PPE resources and limit social contact,” and that this purpose is advanced by the directive.87 87.Rutledge, 956 F.3d at 1031.Show More It then weighed that general benefit against the specific burden on abortion rights.

Because abortion is often burdened by facially neutral laws, and because undue-burden analysis requires courts to evaluate the specific benefits and burdens of a regulation as applied to abortion, this analysis is misguided. Moreover, it suggests that it would be singling out abortion for special treatment to consider the benefits of the law specifically as applied to abortion while declining to analyze the law in the same way with respect to other surgeries. But of course, other surgeries are not afforded the same constitutional protection as abortion, which has implications not just for pregnant people’s health, but also for their reproductive autonomy and their future.

III. Implications

Officials who interpreted their elective surgery orders to ban abortion were working with a unique understanding of electiveness, applicable only to abortion, that cast the request of abortion providers for equal treatment as a request for a special exemption. Yet, abortion can and should be understood as non-elective, or medically necessary, for several reasons. First, as noted above, carrying a pregnancy to term is significantly riskier than ending a pregnancy; moreover, even carrying a pregnancy substantially longer than necessary or longer than desired brings additional health risks.88 88.See supra notes 44–45 and accompanying text.Show More Second, abortion is the ultimate time-sensitive procedure, since it may be sought only during a particular window (which is often shortened by state laws prohibiting abortions after a specific point in the pregnancy). Finally, seeking an abortion is an exercise of reproductive autonomy; an abortion may be necessary to a person’s quality of life and ability to function at home, at work, and in society at large—just as other surgical procedures may be. Like other health conditions, pregnancy is a condition that, if allowed to progress, will result in physical changes, health risks, and very long-term consequences for the patient.

Of course, the person’s subjective attitude toward the pregnancy—whether those physical changes and effects on their life are wanted or unwanted—determines the medical appropriateness of abortion for them, just as an individual patient’s attitudes and values may determine the medical appropriateness of other medical interventions. But this fact does not imply that the pregnant person’s reasons for wanting or not wanting the abortion are relevant to its medical appropriateness—that is, to its “electiveness.”89 89.SeeKatie Watson, Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion 170–74 (2018) [hereinafter Watson, Scarlet A]; Watson, supra note 55.Show More The decision not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term is a medical decision to protect one’s health and one’s body against undesired physical changes that will have a lifelong impact.90 90.As Professor Katie Watson and others have observed, the debate over when abortion is appropriate is thus really a debate about the moral value of the embryo or fetus vis-à-vis that of the woman. See, e.g., Watson, Scarlet A, supra note 89, at 173–74. I agree with this view but do not address that second question, regarding the moral status of the embryo or fetus, here since it is separate from the question of when, if ever, abortion is “elective” or medically unnecessary.Show More

This insight suggests that the framing of most, or even some, abortions as “elective” is deeply problematic. It not only stigmatizes the deeply considered decisions of patients, but it also distorts the doctrine, including by introducing abortion exceptionalism and uncertainty into the analysis of the surgery orders during the pandemic. Further, it aggravates the isolation of abortion providers from other health care providers, making it less likely that physicians will want to engage in abortion provision and leaving them more vulnerable to harassment and violence.91 91.See Hill, The Geography of Abortion Rights, supra note 50, at 24.Show More

The alternative approach would be to integrate abortion into the health care framework by viewing patients’ abortion decisions as analogous to other patients’ health care decisions. This would also mean that reproductive-rights scholars and advocates should avoid the use of terms like “elective”—which possess no clear meaning, except in the most limited contexts, in any case—and avoid using the term “choice” as a stand-in for abortion or abortion rights.92 92.Cf. Robin West, From Choice to Reproductive Justice: De-constitutionalizing Abortion Rights, 118 Yale L.J. 1394, 1410–11 (2009) (critiquing the rhetoric of choice on other grounds).Show More Moreover, abortion providers should be accorded the same respect as other health care providers, who were largely left alone during the pandemic to implement the orders through internal institutional policies that were not subjected to further review.

One concern with suggesting that abortion should be treated like other medical decisions is that it implies a sort of “leveling down” of the abortion right, insofar as other health care procedures do not generally enjoy the same constitutional protection as abortion. Indeed, the fact that abortion implicates reproductive autonomy—a constitutionally protected interest—implies that it should be singled out for especially favorable treatment, not unfavorable treatment, as compared to similar procedures. Yet, as the course of events during the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated, other health care providers and procedures are more likely to be protected by the political process. Indeed, the repeal of elective-surgeries bans that largely ended the abortion-related litigation were likely motivated by concerns of hospitals and patients seeking other kinds of procedures.93 93.See, e.g., Laura Garcia, San Antonio Hospitals Could Resume Elective Surgeries Under Abbott’s New Order, San Antonio Express-News (Apr. 18, 2020), https://www.expressnews.com/business/health-care/article/San-Antonio-hospitals-could-resume-elective-15209439.php [https://perma.cc/X7V5-2WPN].Show More News stories detailed the negative effects that elective surgery bans were having on patients as well as on the bottom lines of hospitals.94 94.Id.; see also Jenny Gold, Some Hospitals Continue with Elective Surgeries Despite COVID-19 Crisis, Kaiser Health News (Mar. 20, 2020), https://khn.org/news/some-hospitals-continue-with-elective-surgeries-despite-covid-19-crisis/ [https://perma.cc/VA9Q-SZ6L] (explaining the difficult financial calculus faced by hospitals in deciding whether to shut down elective surgeries in order to maintain public safety); C.J. LeMaster, Ban on Elective Procedures/Surgeries Impacts Rural Hospitals Already at Risk of Closure, WLOX (Apr. 21, 2020), wlox.com/2020/04/21/ban-elective-proceduressurgeries-impacts-rural-hospitals-alrea­dy-risk-closure/ (detailing rural Mississippi hospital kept afloat by elective surgeries).Show More Those hospitals have enormous political clout.95 95.See generally Steven I. Weissman, Remedies for an Epidemic of Medical Provider Price Gouging, Fla. Bar J. 23, 28, 28 n.55 (Feb. 2016) (noting that medical industry lobbying expenditures exceeded those of the defense, aerospace, oil, and gas industries combined); Jennifer Haberkorn, Hospitals Flex Lobbying Muscle, Politico (Jan. 7, 2013), https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/hospitals-flex-lobbying-muscle-to-bypass-some-cuts-085814 [https://perma.cc/R8TV-EHC8] (“Hospitals have some of the strongest lobbying muscle because every member of Congress has at least one in their district. They don’t just provide needed health care but are typically one of the largest employers, too.”).Show More Thus, if the interests of abortion providers and clinics were taken into account in the same way as those of other health care providers, and if they were considered an integral part of that larger group, they might be afforded the same degree of deference with respect to their decision making. In addition, as Professor Robin West has argued,96 96.See West, supra note 92, at 1412–21.Show More it is possible that engaging the political process rather than relying solely on courts for protection of abortion rights could, in the long run, enable a political discourse that argues for certain rights and benefits that cannot be accommodated within the current reproductive-rights framework—including a right to positive goods like child care, health care, and protection from intimate violence, all of which are necessary for full reproductive dignity and autonomy.

On the other hand, it is possible that all health care should share a degree of constitutional protection. While it has largely been unnecessary to protect access to other medical procedures with a constitutional right, since legislators rarely see political benefits in attacking orthopedic surgery or restricting access to heart medications, there may nonetheless be constitutional limits on the extent to which the government can interfere in private health care decisions.97 97.This argument is made at greater length in B. Jessie Hill, The Constitutional Right To Make Medical Treatment Decisions: A Tale of Two Doctrines, 86 Tex. L. Rev. 277, 313–18 (2007).Show More At a minimum, there is already a constitutionally protected right to make certain significant medical decisions, such as refusing treatment and accessing medication for severe pain.98 98.Id. at 329–32.Show More

The rhetorical integration of abortion into health care may be a part of a post-Roe v. Wade strategy as well. If Roe v. Wade is one day overruled, and the permissibility of abortion is left to individual states, it is possible that some states will consider adopting bans on so-called elective abortion while permitting medically necessary abortions.99 99.Cf.Richard H. Fallon, Jr., If Roe Were Overruled: Abortion and the Constitution in a Post-Roe World, 51 St. Louis U. L.J.611, 626 (2007) (noting that the question of whether a state could regulate abortion even when it poses risks to the woman’s health would still arise in a post-Roe world).Show More A robust understanding of abortion as medically necessary could be useful in combatting attempts to cabin abortion access in this way, either by making it unthinkable in some states to separate out so-called therapeutic from non-therapeutic abortions, or by bolstering the authority of individual patients and physicians to make decisions about which abortions are “medically necessary,” without second-guessing from the state. If abortion providers could draw on the political power of the broader health care community, it would also be more likely that abortion access would remain protected in a post-Roe world.

Conclusion

The litigation over the application of non-essential surgery bans exemplifies underlying tensions in the legal and popular understandings of abortion that are likely to have an impact beyond the end of the pandemic. Access to abortion is threatened by a tendency to single out abortion for uniquely unfavorable treatment within both law and medicine. Long-term protection of abortion rights could be advanced through rhetorical reframing of abortion and bolstering an understanding of abortion as a medically necessary and appropriate health care decision, regardless of the patient’s reason for choosing it.

  1. * Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Judge Ben C. Green Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Thanks to Caroline Mala Corbin, Jonathan Entin, and Liz Sepper for excellent comments and suggestions. ↑
  2. See, e.g., David J. Garrow, Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade: An Historical Perspective, 62 Alb. L. Rev. 833, 837–40 (1999); B. Jessie Hill, The First Amendment and the Politics of Reproductive Health Care, 50 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 103, 103–04 (2016). ↑
  3. The states in which litigation occurred are Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Not all of the litigation has resulted in published opinions. I was involved as counsel in the litigation surrounding Ohio’s order and its application to abortion providers. Ohio was the first state to seek to enforce an elective-surgeries order against abortion clinics. Greer Donley, Beatrice A. Chen & Sonya Borrero, The Legal and Medical Necessity of Abortion Care amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, J.L. & Biosciences (forthcoming) (manuscript at 8–9), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?­abstract_id=­3584728 [https://perma.cc/QL85-XHKQ]. ↑
  4. Caitlin E. Borgmann, Abortion Exceptionalism and Undue Burden Preemption, 71 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1047, 1048 (2014); Caroline Mala Corbin, Abortion Distortions, 71 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1175, 1177 (2014); Ian Vandewalker, Abortion and Informed Consent: How Biased Counseling Laws Mandate Violations of Medical Ethics, 19 Mich. J. Gender &
    L.

    1, 3 (2012). This exceptionalism permeates abortion doctrine. For example, Professor Caroline Mala Corbin has described how courts set aside traditional free speech principles under the First Amendment when abortion-related speech is involved. Corbin, supra, at 1190–92. ↑

  5. See, e.g., Ohio Dep’t of Health, Director’s Order for the Management of Non-Essential Surgeries and Procedures Throughout Ohio (Mar. 17, 2020) (rescinded Apr. 30, 2020), https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/resources/public-health-orders/direct­ors-order-non-essential-surgery-3-17-2020 [https://perma.cc/SXX3-2WTE]; Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, Executive Order GA-09 (Mar. 22, 2020) (superseded Apr. 17, 2020 by GA-15), https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA_09_COVID-19_hos­pital_capacity_IMA­GE_03-22-2020.pdf [https://perma.cc/Z876-HNLV]; W. Va. Exec. Dep’t, Executive Order 16-20 (Mar. 31, 2020), https://governor.wv.gov/Documents/­EO%2016-20electivepro­cedures.pdf. [https://perma.cc/KS6A-FQ5E]. ↑
  6. See sources cited supra note 4; see also, e.g., Robinson v. Att’y Gen., 957 F.3d 1171, 1181 (11th Cir. 2020) (summarizing the state of Alabama’s justifications for its abortion restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic). ↑
  7. ACOG et al., Joint Statement on Abortion Access During the COVID-19 Outbreak (Mar. 18, 2020), https://www.acog.org/news/news-releases/2020/03/joint-statement-on-abortion-access-during-the-covid-19-outbreak [https://perma.cc/T8CA-K9QS]. This statement was joined by the American Board of Obstetrics & Gynecology, together with the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists, the American Gynecological & Obstetrical Society, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the Society for Academic Specialists in General Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Society of Family Planning, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. ↑
  8. Id. ↑
  9. Am. Med. Ass’n, AMA Statement on Government Interference in Reproductive Health Care (Mar. 30, 2020), https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-statements/ama-statement-government-interference-reproductive-health-care [https://perma.cc/6SAC-PJD5]. ↑
  10. Abortions may be performed medically or surgically. Medication-induced abortions require only the taking of pills and are available through approximately ten weeks of pregnancy. So-called “surgical” abortions, which are available both early and later in pregnancy, are not surgeries in the traditional sense, since they do not usually involve any incision or a sterile opening. See, e.g., Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, 136 S. Ct. 2292, 2316 (2016), as revised (June 27, 2016). ↑
  11. Ashton Pittman, Governor Attempts To Ban Mississippi Abortions, Citing Need To Preserve PPE, Jackson Free Press (Apr. 10, 2020), https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/­news/2020/apr/10/governor-bans-abortions-mississippi-claiming-need-/ [https://perma.cc/S­CR5-9PE4]. ↑
  12. Ryan Sharp & Carmen Forman, Gov. Kevin Stitt Says Abortions Included in Suspended Elective Surgeries, Oklahoman (Mar. 27, 2020), https://oklahoman.com/article/­5658751/governors-office-clarifies-executive-order-to-include-abortions [https://perma.cc/­3CJ3-3326]. ↑
  13. Ohio Dep’t of Health, supra note 4. ↑
  14. CreatedEqualFilms, #StopTheSpread: Abortion Centers Pose Serious Health Risk of COVID-19 Spread, YouTube (Mar. 20, 2020), https://youtu.be/KKROXMyZ18A [https://perma.cc/LW2J-T5SH]. ↑
  15. Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *3 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020). ↑
  16. Preterm-Cleveland, 2020 WL 1957173, at *17 (granting preliminary injunction); S. Wind Women’s Ctr. LLC v. Stitt, No. 20-CV-00277, 2020 WL 1932900, at *10 (W.D. Okla. Apr. 20, 2020) (granting preliminary injunction); Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, No. 3:15-CV-00705, 2020 WL 1905147, at *7 (M.D. Tenn. Apr. 17, 2020) (granting preliminary injunction), aff’d as modified, 956 F.3d 913 (6th Cir. 2020), modified, No. 3:15-CV-00705, 2020 WL 2026986 (M.D. Tenn. Apr. 27, 2020); Little Rock Family Planning Servs. v. Rutledge, No. 4:19-CV-00449, 2020 WL 1862830, at *11 (E.D. Ark. Apr. 14, 2020) (granting temporary restraining order), order vacated in part, No. 4:19-CV-00449, 2020 WL 2079224 (E.D. Ark. Apr. 22, 2020); Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *16 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020) (granting preliminary injunction); Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. A-20-CV-00323, 2020 WL 1815587, at *7 (W.D. Tex. Apr. 9, 2020) (granting temporary restraining order), mandamus granted, order vacated in part sub nom. In re Abbott, 956 F.3d 696 (5th Cir. 2020). ↑
  17. A helpful chart can be found in Donley, Chen & Borrero, supra note 2, at 6–8. ↑
  18. Id. ↑
  19. Id. at 4. In Texas, for instance, the district court issued a temporary restraining order enjoining the state from banning medication abortion during the pandemic. Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. A-20-CV-00323, 2020 WL 1502102, at *4 (W.D. Tex. Mar. 30, 2020). After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the injunction, see In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 779 (5th Cir. 2020), the plaintiff clinics moved for a second temporary restraining order, resulting in a narrower injunction that blocked the order from being applied to, inter alia, medication abortions. Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice, 2020 WL 1815587, at *7. After the Fifth Circuit stayed that injunction, see In re Abbott, 800 F. App’x 293, 296 (5th Cir. 2020), Planned Parenthood asked the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency order vacating the stay as applied to medication abortions. Emergency Application to Justice Alito To Vacate Administrative Stay of Temporary Restraining Order Entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit at 1, Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. 19A1019 (Apr. 11, 2020). Before the Supreme Court could act, the Fifth Circuit dissolved its own stay only as applied to medication abortions, finding that it was unclear whether the Governor’s order was meant to prohibit them. In re Abbott, 809 F. App’x 200, 202–03 (5th Cir. 2020). Subsequently, however, that same court issued an opinion holding the second temporary restraining order invalid and allowing the state to prohibit all abortions (including medication abortions), except for women whose pregnancies were close to the legal limit for obtaining a pre-viability abortion. Abbott, 956 F.3d at 724. ↑
  20. Compare, e.g., La. Dep’t of Health, Healthcare Facility Notice/Order #2020-COVID19-All-007, at 2 (Mar. 21, 2020), http://ldh.la.gov/assets/oph/Coronavirus/resources/­providers/LDH-UPDATED-Notice-Med-Surg-Procedures32120.pdf [https://perma.cc/K94T-YB6S] (stating the order would remain in effect “until further notice”), and Ohio Dep’t of Health, supra note 4 (stating the order would remain in effect until the state of emergency no longer exists or the order is rescinded or modified), with Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, supra note 4 (specifying an expiration date of Apr. 21, 2020). ↑
  21. 197 U.S. 11, 22–23 (1905). ↑
  22. 505 U.S. 833, 844–45 (1992). ↑
  23. 136 S. Ct. 2292, 2309–10 (2016). ↑
  24. Casey, 505 U.S. at 872–74; see also Whole Woman’s Health, 136 S. Ct. at 2309 (same). ↑
  25. Whole Woman’s Health, 136 S. Ct. at 2309. In June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo, 140 S. Ct. 2103 (2020), the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that was virtually identical to the Texas law at issue in Whole Woman’s Health. Id. at __ (slip op. at 40). In so doing, a four-Justice plurality applied the balancing test set forth in Whole Woman’s Health. Id. at __ (slip op. at 2–3). Chief Justice Roberts, who provided the critical fifth vote, concurred separately and questioned the validity of requiring courts to consider an abortion restriction’s benefits in relation to its burdens. Id. at __ (slip op. at 2) (Roberts, C.J., concurring). Thus, the balancing test set forth in Whole Woman’s Health remains intact for now, although there are clearly five Justices—Chief Justice Roberts plus the four other conservative Justices—who would like to abandon it. See id. at __ (slip op. at 1–2) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting). ↑
  26. Whole Woman’s Health, 136 S. Ct. at 2310. ↑
  27. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 31 (1905). ↑
  28. 304 U.S. 144, 152–53 n.4 (1938). ↑
  29. Jacobson, 197 U.S. at 24, 26. ↑
  30. See, e.g., Wendy E. Parmet, From Slaughter-House to Lochner: The Rise and Fall of the Constitutionalization of Public Health, 40 Am. J. Legal Hist. 476, 483 (1996) (“To [Justice Samuel] Miller, the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit states from exercising their police power. It only forbid them from exceeding that power.”); id. at 493 (“[T]he Fourteenth Amendment challenges [around the turn of the twentieth century] asserted . . . that the states were denying individual freedom and acting beyond the purview of government.”). ↑
  31. See, e.g., Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 58 (1905). ↑
  32. Scott Burris, Rationality Review and the Politics of Public Health, 34 Vill. L. Rev. 933, 961 (1989). Indeed, the application of fairly rigorous review in fact, while using the language of rational basis review, is arguably the hallmark of cases from the Lochner era. See David N. Mayer, The Myth of “Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism”: Liberty of Contract During the Lochner Era, 36 Hastings Const. L.Q. 217, 262 (2009). ↑
  33. Burris, supra note 31, at 961–62. ↑
  34. James G. Hodge, Jr. & Lawrence O. Gostin, School Vaccination Requirements: Historical, Social, and Legal Perspectives, 90 Ky. L.J. 831, 856–57 (2002) (deriving from Jacobson four limitations on the power of states to act in the interest of public health); cf. Parmet, supra note 29, at 493 (noting that “the concept of the police power” at the time of Jacobson “was used not only to define state power, but to limit it in the name of individual freedom”). ↑
  35. For example, in Caviezel v. Great Neck Pub. Sch., 500 F. App’x 16 (2d Cir. 2012), the Second Circuit Court of Appeals applied Jacobson to uphold a general vaccination requirement for public schooling and observed that the case generally demonstrates that the state interest in protecting against communicable disease outweighs the individual’s interest in refusing unwanted medical interventions. Id. at 19 (citing Cruzan ex rel. Cruzan v. Dir., Mo. Dep’t of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 278 (1990)); see also Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174, 176 (1922) (relying on Jacobson for the proposition that “compulsory vaccination” is within a state’s “police power”); Wendy E. Parmet, Rediscovering Jacobson in the Era of COVID-19, 100 B.U. L. Rev. Online 117, 127, 130–31 (2020) (demonstrating that Jacobson has not been applied, and was not meant to apply, only to emergencies or outbreaks). ↑
  36. In re Abbott, 956 F.3d 696, 704–05, 716 (5th Cir. 2020); In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 784 (5th Cir. 2020); see also Parmet, supra note 34, at 118 (noting that the Fifth Circuit in Abbott treated Jacobson as “requir[ing] courts to limit their review of constitutional rights during a public health emergency”). ↑
  37. In re Rutledge, 956 F.3d 1018, 1027, 1030 (8th Cir. 2020). ↑
  38. Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 934 (6th Cir. 2020) (Thapar, J., dissenting). Interestingly, in enjoining Kentucky’s ban on drive-in religious services during the pandemic, the Sixth Circuit glided past Jacobson without applying, or in fact even mentioning, the language that appeared to require a less stringent level of review. In fact, the court summed up the only paragraph in which it cited Jacobson with the Delphic assertion: “While the law may take periodic naps during a pandemic, we will not let it sleep through one.” Maryville Baptist Church, Inc. v. Beshear, 957 F.3d 610, 615 (6th Cir. 2020). Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a church’s request for emergency relief against California’s ban on larger in-person worship ceremonies. Concurring in the denial, Chief Justice Roberts cited Jacobson to suggest that the need for particular measures during a pandemic should be left primarily to the political process. S. Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, 140 S. Ct. 1613, 1613 (2020) (Roberts, C.J., concurring). Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, dissented from the denial without so much as mentioning Jacobson. Id. at 1614–15 (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting). ↑
  39. Adams & Boyle, 956 F.3d at 927 (“[W]e will not countenance . . . the notion that COVID-19 has somehow demoted Roe and Casey to second-class rights, enforceable against only the most extreme and outlandish violations.”); Robinson v. Att’y Gen., 957 F.3d 1171, 1182–83 (11th Cir. 2020). ↑
  40. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 19 (1905). ↑
  41. Adams & Boyle, 956 F.3d at 927. ↑
  42. 410 U.S. 113 (1973). ↑
  43. See, e.g., Adams & Boyle, 956 F.3d at 922; In re Abbott, 800 F. App’x 293, 296 (5th Cir. 2020). ↑
  44. Planned Parenthood of Se. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 885 (1992). ↑
  45. Linda A. Bartlett, Cynthia J. Berg, Holly B. Shulman, Suzanne B. Zane, Clarice A. Green, Sara Whitehead & Hani K. Atrash, Risk Factors for Legal Induced Abortion-Related Mortality in the United States, 103 Obstetrics & Gynecology 729, 731 (2004). Carrying a pregnancy to term—a process that also generally involves medical intervention—is several times riskier than abortion; thus, arguably all abortions avert serious health risks. See Suzanne Zane, Andreea A. Creanga, Cynthia J. Berg, Karen Pazol, Danielle B. Suchdev, Denise J. Jamieson & William M. Callaghan, Abortion-Related Mortality in the United States 1998–2010, 126 Obstetrics & Gynecology 258, 264 (2015), https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/­2015/08000/Abortion_­Related_Mortality_in_the_United_States_.6.aspx [https://perma.cc/­D8C3-3XMH]; CDC, Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System 2, https://www.cdc.gov/­reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/pregnancy-mortality-surveillance-system.htm [https://perma.cc/4A6P-9GNH]. ↑
  46. Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *7 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020); Bartlett et al., supra note 44, at 735. ↑
  47. See sources cited supra note 42. ↑
  48. Robinson v. Att’y Gen., 957 F.3d 1171, 1182 (11th Cir. 2020) (quoting Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 31 (1905)). ↑
  49. See, e.g., Ohio Dep’t of Health, Director’s Stay Safe Ohio Order 3 (Apr. 30, 2020), https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/static/publicorders/Directors-Stay-Safe-Ohio-Order.pdf [https://perma.cc/JD5F-CKMC]; Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, Executive Order GA-15 (Apr. 17, 2020), https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA-15_hospital_capacity_COVID-19_TRANS_04-17-2020.pdf [https://perma.cc/LYB7-L5T7] (allowing non-medically necessary surgeries to proceed if they would not deplete hospital capacity or PPE). One notable exception is Arkansas, which replaced its stringent ban on abortions not “necessary to protect the life or health of the patient” with an order, adopted April 27, 2020, allowing virtually all “elective” surgeries to proceed but requiring even asymptomatic patients to provide a negative test result for COVID-19 within 48 hours of the surgery. Although some health care facilities presumably have access to such tests, this requirement proved nearly impossible for abortion clinics to meet. Little Rock Family Planning Servs. v. Rutledge, No. 4:20-CV-00470, 2020 WL 2240105, at *4–5 (E.D. Ark. May 7, 2020). ↑
  50. In Texas, for example, the Governor rolled back the state’s reopening and imposed new restrictions on elective surgeries, although the new elective surgeries order appears not to apply to abortions. Emma Platoff, Texas Bans Elective Surgeries in More than 100 Counties as Coronavirus Hospitalizations Keep Climbing, Tex. Tribune (July 9, 2020), https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/09/texas-coronavirus-hospitalizations-elective-surger­ies/ [https://perma.cc/TS6H-8EM7]. Other states, too, have begun shutting down again in response to spikes in COVID-19 infection rates. See Jasmine C. Lee, Sarah Mervosh, Yuriria Avila, Barbara Harvey & Alex Leeds Matthews, See How All 50 States Are Reopening (and Closing Again), N.Y. Times (July 23, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/­2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html [https://perma.cc/SD6T-NW7X]. ↑
  51. I discuss this phenomenon in a forthcoming article. B. Jessie Hill, The Geography of Abortion Rights, 109 Geo. L.J. (forthcoming 2021) (manuscript at 20–21, 21 n.97) (on file with author). ↑
  52. The states temporarily banning “elective” surgeries were Arkansas, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Arkansas Dep’t of Health, ADH Directive on Elective Surgeries (Apr. 3, 2020) (superseded Apr. 27, 2020), https://www.healthy.arkansas.gov/­images/uploads/pdf/Elective_Procedure_Directive_April_3.pdf [https://perma.cc/8WBP-K2K2]; Governor Kimberly K. Reynolds, Proclamation of Disaster Emergency (Mar. 26, 2020) (superseded Apr. 24, 2020), https://governor.iowa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/­Public%20Health%20Proclamation%20-%202020.03.26.pdf [https://perma.cc/KDW8-CZ­AW]; Ohio Dep’t of Health, Director’s Order for the Management of Non-Essential Surgeries and Procedures Throughout Ohio (Mar. 17, 2020) (rescinded Apr. 30, 2020), https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/resources/public-health-orders/direc­tors-order-non-essential-surgery-3-17-2020 [https://perma.cc/ZCT8-5GDU]; Okla. Exec. Order 2020-07 (Fourth Amended) (Mar. 24, 2020), https://www.sos.ok.gov/documents/­executive/1919.pdf [https://perma.cc/EAG4-KHP6]; Tenn. Exec. Order 25 (Apr. 8, 2020) (expired Apr. 30, 2020), https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/pub/execorders/exec-orders-lee25.pdf [https://perma.cc/P5L3-N2SJ]. ↑
  53. See, e.g., Michelle J. Bayefsky, Deborah Bartz & Katie L. Watson, Abortion During the Covid-19 Pandemic—Ensuring Access to an Essential Health Service, 382 New Eng. J. Med. e47(1), e47(2) (2020); Benjamin Elliot Yelnosky Smith, Deborah Bartz, Alisa B. Goldberg & Elizabeth Janiak, “Without Any Indication”: Stigma and a Hidden Curriculum Within Medical Students’ Discussion of Elective Abortion, 214 Soc. Sci. & Med. 26, 27 (2018) (“The word ‘elective’ has had a consistent medical meaning since as early as 1936 when it was used to describe surgeries that could be planned rather than done emergently.”). ↑
  54. Smith et al., supra note 52, at 27. ↑
  55. See, e.g., Governor Kimberly K. Reynolds, supra note 51; Ohio Dep’t of Health, supra note 4. Those states that did not use the term “elective” applied a variety of standards to identify the procedures that would be banned. Alabama initially banned “elective” procedures but then amended that order to permit only those procedures “necessary to treat an emergency medical condition” or “necessary to avoid serious harm from an underlying condition or disease, or necessary as part of a patient’s ongoing and active treatment.” Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *2 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020) (quoting Ala. Dep’t of Pub. Health, Order of the State Health Officer Suspending Certain Public Gatherings due to Risk of Infection by COVID-19 (Mar. 27, 2020) (internal quotation marks omitted)). In Texas, the order allowed procedures to go forward if the patient would otherwise “be at risk for serious adverse medical consequences or death, as determined by the patient’s physician.” Tex. Governor Greg Abbott, supra note 4. ↑
  56. Smith et al., supra note 52, at 27; Katie Watson, Why We Should Stop Using the Term “Elective Abortion”, 20 AMA J. Ethics 1175, 1176 (2018). ↑
  57. See Smith et al., supra note 52, at 29. Similarly, in a recent case involving a challenge to an ordinance that attempted to exclude surgical abortion clinics from operating within a particular city, the parties disputed whether abortion services fell within a zoning provision allowing for facilities providing outpatient services that were “therapeutic, preventative or correctional.” FemHealth USA, Inc. v. City of Mount Juliet, No. 3:19-CV-01141, 2020 WL 2098234, at *4 (M.D. Tenn. May 1, 2020). Drawing a distinction between therapeutic medical procedures and those it presumably deemed elective, the City claimed “abortion . . . is not preventative. It is not correctional. There are therapeutic abortions where the life or health of the mother is at risk.” City of Mount Juliet’s Response to Motion for Preliminary Injunction at 11, FemHealth USA, Inc. v. City of Mount Juliet, 2020 WL 2098234 (M.D. Tenn. Feb. 28, 2020) (No. 3:19-CV-01141). ↑
  58. Lawrence B. Finer, Lori F. Frohwirth, Lindsay A. Dauphinee, Susheela Singh & Ann M. Moore, Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives, 37 Persp. on Sexual & Reprod. Health 110, 112–14 (2005). ↑
  59. Id. Of course, as one scholar has pointed out, in another sense, “[e]very abortion is elective,” since even patients facing serious health risks can choose whether to have the procedure or undergo the risks to their health. Watson, supra note 55, at 1176. ↑
  60. Finer et al., supra note 57, at 110–12. ↑
  61. Thanks to Jonathan Entin for pointing this out. ↑
  62. See Smith et al., supra note 52, at 29. ↑
  63. Watson, supra note 55, at 1178. ↑
  64. Id. at 1175. ↑
  65. Id.; see also Smith et al., supra note 52, at 26 (“‘Elective’ negatively marked and isolated some abortions, and participants used the term to convey judgement about patients’ social and reproductive histories.”). ↑
  66. S. Wind Women’s Ctr. LLC v. Stitt, No. 20-CV-00277, 2020 WL 1932900, at *3 (W.D. Okla. Apr. 20, 2020); Planned Parenthood Ctr. for Choice v. Abbott, No. A-20-CV-00323, 2020 WL 1815587, at *2 (W.D. Tex. Apr. 9, 2020). ↑
  67. Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 931 (6th Cir. 2020) (Thapar, J., dissenting). ↑
  68. Combined Emergency Motion for Stay Pending Appeal and Merits Brief at 12–13, Yost v. Preterm-Cleveland, No. 20-3365 (6th Cir. Apr. 1, 2020). ↑
  69. In re Rutledge, 956 F.3d 1018, 1028–32 (8th Cir. 2020). ↑
  70. Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *4 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020). The state had also sent health inspectors to examine the records of three abortion clinics but never revealed whether it found any violations of the orders. Id. ↑
  71. Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *2 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020). ↑
  72. Id. ↑
  73. Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 931 (6th Cir. 2020) (Thapar, J., dissenting). ↑
  74. See supra note 44 and accompanying text. ↑
  75. B. Jessie Hill, What Is the Meaning of Health? Constitutional Implications of Defining “Medical Necessity” and “Essential Health Benefits” Under the Affordable Care Act, 38 Am. J.L. & Med. 445, 450–57 (2012); Wendy K. Mariner, Patients’ Rights After Health Care Reform: Who Decides What Is Medically Necessary?, 84 Am. J. Pub. Health 1515, 1516–17 (1994). ↑
  76. See sources cited supra note 3 and accompanying text. ↑
  77. Robinson v. Marshall, No. 2:19-CV-00365, 2020 WL 1847128, at *3 (M.D. Ala. Apr. 12, 2020). ↑
  78. Id. at *4. ↑
  79. Id. at *5. ↑
  80. Preterm-Cleveland v. Att’y Gen., No. 1:19-CV-00360, 2020 WL 1957173, at *16 (S.D. Ohio Apr. 23, 2020). ↑
  81. Id. at *16 n.19. ↑
  82. Petitioners’ Letter Brief at 4, In re Abbott, No. 20-50296 (5th Cir. Apr. 13, 2020). ↑
  83. Id. ↑
  84. Preterm-Cleveland, 2020 WL 1957173, at *9; see also Adams & Boyle, P.C. v. Slatery, 956 F.3d 913, 928 (6th Cir. 2020) (“[T]he State suggests that if we permit this one exemption, surely the joint-replacement surgeons, the cataract-removal specialists, and every other medical provider affected by EO-25’s bar on elective procedures will follow . . . .”); In re Rutledge, 956 F.3d 1018, 1032 (8th Cir. 2020) (stating that the district court’s order allowing abortions to proceed during the pandemic “bestow[ed] on [surgical] abortion providers a blanket exemption from a generally-applicable emergency public health measure” (quoting In re Abbott, 954 F.3d 772, 795 (5th Cir. 2020))). At the same time, abortion providers were uniquely disabled in many cases from pursuing measures that would allow them to conserve PPE and limit exposure, such as using telemedicine for providing medication abortion. While telemedicine has been available and encouraged during the pandemic for most procedures, state laws requiring in-person visits for abortion inhibited its expansion to abortion services. See Ushma D. Upadhyay & Daniel Grossman, Telemedicine for Medication Abortion, 100 Contraception 351, 351 (2019). ↑
  85. Rutledge, 956 F.3d at 1028–29. ↑
  86. Id. at 1029 (emphasis added). ↑
  87. 136 S. Ct. 2292, 2299, 2314 (2016), as revised (June 27, 2016); see also Women’s Med. Prof’l Corp. v. Baird, 438 F.3d 595, 603 (6th Cir. 2006) (“The generally applicable and neutral regulation in this case (the transfer agreement requirement) affects an abortion clinic, which is unable to satisfy the regulation’s requirements. Therefore, Casey and other relevant case law regarding state restrictions on abortion apply.”); Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa, Inc. v. Atchison, 126 F.3d 1042, 1048 (8th Cir. 1997) (“[B]y requiring the plaintiff to undergo the CON review process, the defendants would impose a substantial and unconstitutional burden on the right of access to abortion.”). ↑
  88. Rutledge, 956 F.3d at 1031. ↑
  89. See supra notes 44–45 and accompanying text. ↑
  90. See Katie Watson, Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion 170–74 (2018) [hereinafter Watson, Scarlet A]; Watson, supra note 55. ↑
  91. As Professor Katie Watson and others have observed, the debate over when abortion is appropriate is thus really a debate about the moral value of the embryo or fetus vis-à-vis that of the woman. See, e.g., Watson, Scarlet A, supra note 89, at 173–74. I agree with this view but do not address that second question, regarding the moral status of the embryo or fetus, here since it is separate from the question of when, if ever, abortion is “elective” or medically unnecessary. ↑
  92. See Hill, The Geography of Abortion Rights, supra note 50, at 24. ↑
  93. Cf. Robin West, From Choice to Reproductive Justice: De-constitutionalizing Abortion Rights, 118 Yale L
    .J.

    1394, 1410–11 (2009) (critiquing the rhetoric of choice on other grounds). ↑

  94. See, e.g., Laura Garcia, San Antonio Hospitals Could Resume Elective Surgeries
    Under Abbott’s New Order, San Antonio Express-News (Apr. 18, 2020), https://www.expressnews.com/business/health-care/article/San-Antonio-hospitals-could-resume-elective-15209439.php [https://perma.cc/X7V5-2WPN]. ↑
  95. Id.; see also Jenny Gold, Some Hospitals Continue with Elective Surgeries Despite COVID-19 Crisis, Kaiser Health News (Mar. 20, 2020), https://khn.org/news/some-hospitals-continue-with-elective-surgeries-despite-covid-19-crisis/ [https://perma.cc/VA9Q-SZ6L] (explaining the difficult financial calculus faced by hospitals in deciding whether to shut down elective surgeries in order to maintain public safety); C.J. LeMaster, Ban on Elective Procedures/Surgeries Impacts Rural Hospitals Already at Risk of Closure, WLOX (Apr. 21, 2020), wlox.com/2020/04/21/ban-elective-proceduressurgeries-impacts-rural-hospitals-alrea­dy-risk-closure/ (detailing rural Mississippi hospital kept afloat by elective surgeries). ↑
  96. See generally Steven I. Weissman, Remedies for an Epidemic of Medical Provider Price Gouging, Fla. Bar J. 23, 28, 28 n.55 (Feb. 2016) (noting that medical industry lobbying expenditures exceeded those of the defense, aerospace, oil, and gas industries combined); Jennifer Haberkorn, Hospitals Flex Lobbying Muscle, Politico (Jan. 7, 2013), https://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/hospitals-flex-lobbying-muscle-to-bypass-some-cuts-085814 [https://perma.cc/R8TV-EHC8] (“Hospitals have some of the strongest lobbying muscle because every member of Congress has at least one in their district. They don’t just provide needed health care but are typically one of the largest employers, too.”). ↑
  97. See West, supra note 92, at 1412–21. ↑
  98. This argument is made at greater length in B. Jessie Hill, The Constitutional Right To Make Medical Treatment Decisions: A Tale of Two Doctrines, 86 Tex. L. Rev. 277, 313–18 (2007). ↑
  99. Id. at 329–32. ↑
  100. Cf. Richard H. Fallon, Jr., If Roe Were Overruled: Abortion and the Constitution in a Post-Roe World, 51 St. Louis U. L.J
    .

    611, 626 (2007) (noting that the question of whether a state could regulate abortion even when it poses risks to the woman’s health would still arise in a post-Roe world). ↑

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