Opinion ID: 2103784
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: proper standard of appellate review

Text: The majority opinion concludes that regulations infringing on the right to obtain an abortion are subject to strict scrutiny analysis because this right [to obtain an abortion] is inherent in the concept of ordered liberty embodied in the Tennessee Constitution, and [t]herefore, the statutory provisions regulating abortion must be subjected to strict scrutiny analysis. Although this ipso facto conclusion may apply in some cases, strict scrutiny is certainly not required by the federal Constitution with regard to the right to obtain an abortion. See Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992) (recognizing that the right to obtain an abortion is a fundamental right, but rejecting application of strict scrutiny). Rather, the only legitimate rationale for holding that abortion regulations may be subject to strict scrutiny analysis in Tennessee is that the Tennessee Constitution provides greater protection for this right than the federal Constitution. If our Constitution does not so provide, then this Court is obliged to apply the undue burden standard of review, which was articulated by Casey and compelled by the Fourteenth Amendment. Before this Court may properly conclude that the Tennessee Constitution affords its citizens a greater right to obtain an abortion than the federal Constitutionand therefore compels strict scrutiny analysis of our regulations in situations when the federal Constitution does notit should carefully examine the precise constitutional sources of this right. Only when a right is implicitly or explicitly protected by a constitutional provision can it be deemed fundamental and subject to heightened scrutiny. See State v. Tester, 879 S.W.2d 823, 828 (Tenn.1994); Doe v. Norris, 751 S.W.2d 834, 841 (Tenn.1988). The majority opinion concludes that the right to obtain an abortion stems from certain fundamental procreational rights, which in turn are derived from the general right of privacy. Even assuming the accuracy of these propositions, the Court should thoroughly examine the sources and parameters of the state right of privacy before concluding that it is more broad than the corresponding federal right. Although a general right of privacy is mentioned nowhere in the text of our Constitution, this Court first recognized in Davis v. Davis, 842 S.W.2d 588 (Tenn.1992), that a general right of privacy does in fact exist under the Tennessee Constitution. This general right is primarily grounded in the Law of the Land Clause of Article I, section 8 of our Constitution, which states: That no man shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner destroyed or deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. According to the Davis Court, a general right of privacy existed in Article I, section 8 because the right was reflected in several sections of the Declaration of Rights. 842 S.W.2d at 600. These several sections included the freedom of worship, the freedoms of speech and press, the prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the regulation of quartering of troops. Id. Despite the majority's conclusion today that the state right of privacy is much more broad than the corresponding federal right, there are at least three specific reasons why such a conclusion is erroneous. I discuss each of these reasons below.
The first reason that the state right of privacy cannot be more broad than the corresponding federal right is that this Court originally defined the scope and parameters of the state right of privacy exclusively in terms of federal constitutional law. Although the majority claims that Davis supports its position concerning the breadth of the state right of privacy, the scope of the state right of privacy still cannot be said to exceed that of the federal right for one simple reason: every single state constitutional provision relied upon by the Davis Court to discover the state right of privacy also has corresponding federal support and protection. Because Davis interpreted and defined the state right of privacy solely in terms of the corresponding federal right, the majority's reliance on this case is misplaced and somewhat curious. In an attempt to deny this critical fact, the majority emphatically states that we explicitly relied on the Tennessee Constitution in Davis to extend protection [through the right of privacy] to the husband's right to procreational autonomy. While Davis was certainly a decision of state constitutional law as the majority maintains, the fact still remains that the rationale of Davis used to discover this new state constitutional right was premised entirely upon federal case law. There is certainly nothing in the constitutional thought of Davis that warrants placing the right of privacy on such a high pedestal, because as Davis implicitly acknowledges, the federal courts were the sole architects of our state house of privacy. The majority counters that some of these state protections are more broad than their corresponding federal counterparts, and consequently, the state right of privacy must also be more broad. The majority even goes so far as to count the words of various state and federal provisions, apparently on the novel constitutional theory that more words equal greater breadth. If word counting is the new method by which to determine the proper scope of our constitutional provisions, I tremble at the future of constitutional interpretation in this state. Perhaps this innovative school of thought needs further consideration before it is used as rationale to declare laws unconstitutional. After all, the anti-slavery clause of Article I, section 33 contains seven words less than the Thirteenth Amendment, and the double jeopardy provision of Article I, section 10 contains three words less than the similar clause in the Fifth Amendment. Even the language of Article I, section 27, upon which the majority fashions its inherent right of privacy, is shorter than its federal counterpart in the Third Amendment. Is this Court now to infer, based on this logic, that each of these state protections is theoretically less broad that their federal counterparts? I need hardly say that such a conclusion over stretches even the most elastic of imaginations. I take no issue with the ability of this Court to find, in the proper case, that greater protections exist under our State Constitution. There must be, however, some legitimate reason why this conclusion follows in a particular case, such as key differences in the historical background of the constitutional provisions, differences in the respective language of the provisions, or even key differences in the historical application of the clauses in Tennessee. Unless some legitimate difference between respective state and federal clauses can be found, courts engaging in such interpretive exploits cease to exercise Judgment and undertake to exercise Will instead. Cf. The Federalist No. 78 (Alexander Hamilton) (The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body. The observation, if it prove any thing, would prove that there ought to be no judges distinct from that body.). The courts of this state simply do not exercise legitimate judicial power when their decisions are grounded in nothing more than mere pronouncements or declarations. The only Tennessee case to actually hold that a state constitutional provision is more broad than its corresponding federal protection relied upon the actual language of the text. Our decision in State v. Jacumin, 778 S.W.2d 430 (Tenn.1989), provides an excellent example of when textual differences could support a finding that the Tennessee Constitution gives greater protection than a corresponding federal right. In Jacumin , this Court concluded that the language in Article I, section 7, which states that a warrant may not issue without evidence of the fact committed, weighed against adopting the totality of the circumstances test for examining the sufficiency of an affidavit used to support a search warrant. Instead, this Court retained the Aguilar-Spinelli two-pronged test, which specifically requires specific examination of the credibility and reliability of the informant. Other than Jacumin , however, I am unaware of any case in any area of law that actually holds that a state freedom is greater than the corresponding federal freedom. While this language appears in many of our cases, this Court has not seen fit to employ the possibility of greater protection in even one other case. [1] Accordingly, while the state protections may be greater in theory, they have certainly not received such attention in practice. As a practical matter, therefore, even if the state right of privacy is grounded in these other provisions of the Declaration of Rights, it still cannot be more broad than the corresponding federal right.
The second reason that the state right of privacy cannot be more broad than the federal right is because our Constitution is not structured in such a way as to permit this conclusion. I do not necessarily disagree that a right of privacy may exist in Tennessee, but the reasoning used by the Davis Court to discover the right of privacy, coupled with the structure of the Declaration of Rights itself, leads me to conclude that the scope of the right in Tennessee is, at most, co-extensive with the federal rightif for no other reason than the right of privacy enjoys significantly less constitutional foundation in this state. In Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 484, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965), the Supreme Court of the United States first stated that the federal right of privacy was actually grounded in the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the right of privacy was said to be a penumbral right that emanated from other constitutional amendments, the textual basis of the right of privacy was said to be the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. See also Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 153, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973) (finding that the privacy right giving rise to a right to abortion is broad enough to fall within the Ninth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment). While constitutional scholars have debated whether Justice Douglas properly interpreted the Ninth Amendment in Griswold to include a general right of privacy, [2] such a right arguably falls within the plain language of that Amendment, which contemplates that other rights may exist although not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. In stark contrast to the provisions of the federal Constitution, however, the Tennessee Constitution does not contain a savings clause similar to that of the Ninth Amendment into which a court could legitimately read other unenumerated rights. In fact, unlike many of our sister states, our Constitution does not even contain a general natural rights clause purporting to protect inalienable rights, which would at least lend a modicum of support to the majority's assertion concerning the presence and strength of our right of privacy. [3] Because our Constitution contains neither of these clauses, a careful and prudent examination of the Declaration of Rights counsels against holding that the right of privacy in this state is so much more broad than the corresponding federal right. Indeed, because the right of privacy cannot be textually grounded in the text of our Constitution outside of Article I, section 8, one may even rationally concludeshockingly contrary to the position taken by the majoritythat the federal right of privacy is actually the more broad of the two. To offset this lack of structural support, the majority casts a wide net over our Declaration of Rights to fish out constitutional provisions which seemingly give rise to a broad right of privacy. The majority goes so far as to declare that the right of privacy, including the right of procreational autonomy, arises from the liberty provisions of Article I, sections 1 and 2. Citation to sections 1 and 2 of Article I for this proposition is nothing short of remarkable, and in its haste, the majority even declares that [t]he provisions of the Tennessee Constitution imply protection of an individual's right to make inherently personal decisions, and to act on those decisions, without government interference. This unqualified statement is literally breathtaking, as its natural conclusion is that the government is without legitimate power to enact reasonable legislation having a direct effect on inherently personal decisions. Any reasonable and objective interpretation of these two sections simply cannot support the view that these two provisions reflect a right to be left alone by the government. Rather than providing a right to be left alone, section 2 of Article I more properly contemplates that the people have a duty to obey the reasonable laws of government, irrespective of whether those laws directly affect the people. [4] The majority should give more careful attention to the actual language of this clause, which condemns only the exercise of arbitrary power. Although the majority lauds this right to revolution, section 2 provides no such right to be left alone from reasonable legislation that has been duly enacted according to constitutional procedures. Sections 1 and 2 of Article I simply do not reflect a right of privacy in the sense that the government has no power to enact laws directly affecting its citizens, and these clauses are improperly construed when used to support striking down reasonable abortion regulations under the guise of protecting a right of privacy. When understood in their proper historical context, these provisions are really a reflection of the fundamental principal that the people are the ultimate sovereign and that all governmental power is derived from them. Even Davis did not take the questionable constitutional leap taken by the majority today, as that Court cited these two sections of Article I only to show that individual liberty is deeply embedded in our Constitutionnot to show that these clauses reflected a general right of privacy. See 842 S.W.2d at 599-600. Regrettably, this type of analysis, with its complete disregard for the language and purpose of the clause, exemplifies how willing the majority is to construe constitutional precedent to reach its desired result in this case.
The third reason that the majority errs in concluding that the State right of privacy is more broad than the corresponding federal right is that the only proper textual basis of the right of privacy, the Law of the Land Clause of Article I, section 8, is not more broad than its federal counterparts, the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. When discussing the sources of the state right of privacy, the majority conspicuously omits any reference to Hawk v. Hawk, 855 S.W.2d 573 (Tenn.1993), which holds that Article I, section 8 is the only constitutional provision in which the right of privacy may be textually grounded. Id. at 579. Certainly, no legal precedent or canon of constitutional construction allows this Court to discover previously unprotected rights without at least some textual support in our Constitution, and this Court in Hawk repudiated such an approach by analyzing the right of privacy with exclusive reference to Article I, section 8. In the present case, however, the majority apparently ignores the need for textual support and attempts to use all of the provisions cited by Davis to bootstrap a right of privacyand by extension, a right to obtain an abortioninto the Constitution. Even as the majority attempts to re-write the budding Tennessee law of privacy, though, industrious students of the law should read carefully once again the cases from this Court deciphering the scope of the state right of privacy. While the constitutional provisions cited by the Davis Court as reflecting a right of privacy unquestionably have various aspects of privacy at their core, none of these provisions can be said to actually serve as the textual basis of procreational rights on their own. The protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, for example, says nothing about the right not to bear children, and procreational rights cannot be read into the language regulating quartering of troops. Only the Law of the Land Clause of Article I, section 8 is sufficiently vague and ambiguous to provide textual support for the right to obtain an abortion. The essential question to be answered in this case, therefore, is whether the Law of the Land Clause is more broad than the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which serve as the basis for protecting abortion rights under the federal Constitution. See Casey, 505 U.S. at 846, 112 S.Ct. 2791. Only if the liberty protections of the Tennessee Law of the Land Clause are more broad than those protections guaranteed by the federal due process clauses can this Court properly hold abortion regulations to the rigors of strict scrutiny analysis. Accordingly, if Article I, section 8 does provide a greater sanctuary for abortion rights than the federal due process clausesas the majority holds todayone would expect to find key differences in the historical background of the clauses, differences in the respective language of the clauses, or key differences in the historical application of the Law of the Land Clause in Tennessee. Nevertheless, while these factors are completely ignored by the majority opinion, my own analysis leads me to conclude that the two protections are, at most, co-extensive, and when a statute is permissible under one constitutional provision, then it is permissible under the other as well.