Opinion ID: 76651
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Glucksberg Analysis

Text: 19 Because the ACLU is seeking recognition of a right neither mentioned in the Constitution nor encompassed within the reach of the Supreme Court's existing fundamental-right precedents, we must turn to the two-step analytical framework that the Court has established for evaluating new fundamental-rights claims. See Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 720-21, 117 S.Ct. at 2268. First, in analyzing a request for recognition of a new fundamental right, or extension of an existing one, we must begin with a careful description of the asserted right. Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292, 302, 113 S.Ct. 1439, 1447, 123 L.Ed.2d 1 (1993); see also Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 721, 117 S.Ct. at 2268. Second, and most critically, we must determine whether this asserted right, carefully described, is one of those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition, and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 720-21, 117 S.Ct. at 2268 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). 20 This analysis, as the Supreme Court has stressed, must proceed with utmost care because of the dangers inherent in the process of elevating extra-textual rights to constitutional status, thereby removing them from the democratic field of play: 21 By extending constitutional protection to an asserted right or liberty interest, we, to a great extent, place the matter outside the arena of public debate and legislative action. We must therefore exercise the utmost care whenever we are asked to break new ground in this field, lest the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause be subtly transformed into the policy preferences of the members of this Court. 22 Id. at 720, 117 S.Ct. at 2267-68 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). The mandate to proceed carefully applies with added force when venturing into terrain where the Supreme Court itself has tread lightly, as it has here. As we explain, the district court failed to exercise this utmost care in conducting the two-pronged Glucksberg analysis.
23 As we noted in Williams II, the district court's initial opinion narrowly framed the analysis as the question whether the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy protects an individual's liberty to use sexual devices when engaging in lawful, private, sexual activity. 240 F.3d at 953 (internal quotation marks omitted). On appeal, we affirmed this formulation, stating that the district court correctly framed the fundamental rights analysis in this case. Id. However, on remand, the district court abandoned its initial, careful framing of the issue and instead characterized the asserted right more broadly as a generalized right to sexual privacy. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d at 1277 (emphasis omitted). 10 24 In searching for, and ultimately finding, this right to sexual privacy, the district court did little to define its scope and bounds. As formulated by the district court, the right potentially encompasses a great universe of sexual activities, including many that historically have been, and continue to be, prohibited. At oral arguments, the ACLU contended that no responsible counsel would challenge prohibitions such as those against pederasty and adult incest under a right to sexual privacy theory. However, mere faith in the responsibility of the bar scarcely provides a legally cognizable, or constitutionally significant, limiting principle in applying the right in future cases. 11 25 The sole limitation provided by the district court's ruling was that the right would extend only to consenting adults. Id. at 1294. The consenting-adult formula, of course, is a corollary to John Stuart Mill's celebrated harm principle, which would allow the state to proscribe only conduct that causes identifiable harm to another. See generally John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Elizabeth Rapaport ed., Hackett Pub. Co. 1978) (1859). Regardless of its force as a policy argument, however, it does not translate ipse dixit into a constitutionally cognizable standard. See Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 68, 93 S.Ct. 2628, 2641, 37 L.Ed.2d 446 (1973) ([F]or us to say that our Constitution incorporates the proposition that conduct involving consenting adults only is always beyond state regulation, is a step we are unable to take.). 26 If we were to accept the invitation to recognize a right to sexual intimacy, this right would theoretically encompass such activities as prostitution, obscenity, and adult incest — even if we were to limit the right to consenting adults. See, e.g., id. at 68 n. 15, 93 S.Ct. at 2641 n. 15 (The state statute books are replete with constitutionally unchallenged laws against prostitution, suicide, voluntary self-mutilation, brutalizing `bare fist' prize fights, and duels, although these crimes may only directly involve `consenting adults.'). This in turn would require us to subject all infringements on such activities to strict scrutiny. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 721, 117 S.Ct. at 2268. In short, by framing our inquiry so broadly as to look for a general right to sexual intimacy, we would be answering many questions not before us on the present facts. 27 Indeed, the requirement of a careful description is designed to prevent the reviewing court from venturing into vaster constitutional vistas than are called for by the facts of the case at hand. See Brockett v. Spokane Arcades, Inc., 472 U.S. 491, 501, 105 S.Ct. 2794, 2801, 86 L.Ed.2d 394 (1985). One of the cardinal rules of constitutional jurisprudence is that the scope of the asserted right — and thus the parameters of the inquiry — must be dictated by the precise facts of the immediate case. Id.; see also Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dept. of Health, 497 U.S. 261, 277-78, 110 S.Ct. 2841, 2851, 111 L.Ed.2d 224 (1990) ([I]n deciding a question of such magnitude and importance it is the better part of wisdom not to attempt, by any general statement, to cover every possible phase of the subject.) (citation and internal punctuation omitted). 28 Glucksberg and Flores, cases in which the Court was asked to expand certain substantive due process rights, are instructive examples. In Glucksberg, the lower court and the petitioners had variously characterized the asserted right as a liberty interest in determining the time and manner of one's death, 521 U.S. at 722, 117 S.Ct. at 2269, a liberty to choose how to die and a right to control one's final days, id., and the liberty of competent, terminally ill adults to make end-of-life decisions free of undue government interference, id. at 724, 117 S.Ct. at 2269. The Court rejected these characterizations as overbroad, noting its tradition of carefully formulating the interest at stake in substantive-due-process cases. Id. at 722, 117 S.Ct. at 2269. Then, looking to the specific statute under challenge — a ban on assisted suicide — the Court recast the asserted right as a right to commit suicide which itself includes a right to assistance in doing so, id., or as a right to commit suicide with another's assistance, id. at 724, 117 S.Ct. at 2269. 29 Under challenge in Flores was an immigration regulation that governed the detention and release of alien juveniles. 507 U.S. at 294-98, 113 S.Ct. at 1443-45. The respondents, a class of detained alien juveniles, argued that the regulation violated their fundamental right to freedom from physical restraint. Id. at 299, 113 S.Ct. at 1446 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Supreme Court, emphasizing the importance of beginning substantive-due-process analysis with a careful description, rejected respondents' broad formulation of the implicated liberty interests. 507 U.S. at 302, 113 S.Ct. at 1447. The Court then restated the putative right — by careful reference to the challenged regulation: 30 The freedom from physical restraint invoked by respondents is not at issue in this case.... Nor is the right asserted the right of a child to be released from all other custody into the custody of its parents, legal guardian, or even close relatives: The challenged regulation requires such release when it is sought. Rather, the right at issue is the alleged right of a child who has no available parent, close relative, or legal guardian, and for whom the government is responsible, to be placed in the custody of a willing-and-able private custodian rather than of a government-operated or government-selected child-care institution. 31 Id. (internal citations omitted). 32 As in Glucksberg and Flores, the scope of the liberty interest at stake here must be defined in reference to the scope of the Alabama statute. We begin by observing that the broad rights to privacy and sexual privacy invoked by the ACLU are not at issue. The statute invades the privacy of Alabama residents in their bedrooms no more than does any statute restricting the availability of commercial products for use in private quarters as sexual enhancements. 12 Instead, the challenged Alabama statute bans the commercial distribution of sexual devices. 13 At a minimum, therefore, the putative right at issue is the right to sell and purchase sexual devices. 33 It is more than that, however. For purposes of constitutional analysis, restrictions on the ability to purchase an item are tantamount to restrictions on the use of that item. Thus it was that the Glucksberg Court analyzed a ban on providing suicide assistance as a burden on the right to receive suicide assistance. 521 U.S. at 723, 117 S.Ct. at 2269. Similarly, prohibitions on the sale of contraceptives have been analyzed as burdens on the use of contraceptives. Carey, 431 U.S. at 688, 97 S.Ct. at 2018 ([T]he same test must be applied to state regulations that burden an individual's right ... by substantially limiting access to the means of effectuating that decision as is applied to state statutes that prohibit the decision entirely.). Because a prohibition on the distribution of sexual devices would burden an individual's ability to use the devices, our analysis must be framed not simply in terms of whether the Constitution protects a right to sell and buy sexual devices, but whether it protects a right to use such devices. 34
35 With this careful description in mind, we turn now to the second prong of the fundamental-rights inquiry. The crucial inquiry under this prong is whether the right to use sexual devices when engaging in lawful, private sexual activity is (1) objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition and (2) implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if [it] were sacrificed. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 721, 117 S.Ct. at 2268 (citations omitted). Although the district court never addressed the second part of this inquiry, it answered the history and tradition question in the affirmative. 36 We find that the district court, in reaching this conclusion, erred on four levels. The first error relates back to the district court's over-broad framing of the asserted right in question. Having framed the relevant right as a generalized right to sexual privacy, the district court's history and tradition analysis consisted largely of an irrelevant exploration of the history of sex in America. Second, we find that this analysis placed too much weight on contemporary practice and attitudes with respect to sexual conduct and sexual devices. Third, rather than look for a history and tradition of protection of the asserted right, the district court asked whether there was a history and tradition of state non-interference with the right. Finally, we find that the district court's uncritical reliance on certain expert declarations in interpreting the historical record was flawed and that its reliance on certain putative concessions was unfounded. 37
38 The district court began its Glucksberg -mandated history and tradition inquiry by defining its task as one of determining whether to recognize a fundamental right to sexual privacy. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d at 1277. After an extensive survey of the history of sex in American culture and law — replete with cites to the Kinsey studies and Michel Foucault — the district court concluded that there exists a constitutionally inherent right to sexual privacy that firmly encompasses state non-interference with private, adult, consensual sexual relationships. Id. at 1296. As examined above, the Supreme Court's own reticence in this area, and its admonition to carefully define the right at stake, convince us that the district court erred in undertaking to find a generalized right to sexual privacy. Given this over-broad starting point, the district court's subsequent inquiry, predictably, was likewise broader than called for by the facts of the case. The inquiry should have been focused not broadly on the vast topic of sex in American cultural and legal history, but narrowly and more precisely on the treatment of sexual devices within that history and tradition. 39
40 In reaching its holding, the district court relied heavily on contemporary practice, emphasizing the contemporary trend of legislative and societal liberalization of attitudes toward consensual, adult sexual activity. Id. at 1294; see generally id. at 1289-94; see also id. at 1296 (holding that there is a `history, legal tradition, and practice' in this country of deliberate state non-interference with private sexual relationships between married couples, and a contemporary practice of the same between unmarried persons) (emphasis added) (citation omitted). 41 Our first concern is the legal significance, or the lack thereof, of much of the district court's source material for this contemporary practice. In addition to invoking a cluster of Supreme Court precedents touching on matters of procreation and familial integrity, the district court looked to social science data respecting premarital intercourse, marriage and divorce rates, and the like. Id. at 1290. It further noted the revolutionary impact of the Kinsey studies, the imagery and implements of adult sexual relationships [that] pervade modern American society, the availability of pornography of the grossest sort, and the widespread marketing of Viagra (including by such notable personalities as former United States Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Robert J. Dole and popular NASCAR driver Mark Martin). Id. at 1294. While such evidence undoubtedly confirms the district court's discovery of the specter of a twentieth century sexual liberalism, id. at 1291, its relevance under Glucksberg is scant. 42 The district court justified this emphasis by noting that the Glucksberg Court had relied on contemporary practice in reaching its determination that assisted suicide is not a constitutional right. See, e.g., id. at 1275 ( Glucksberg considered current statutes, legislative debates, voter initiatives, and the positions of contemporary task forces and commissions on the issue of assisted suicide). This gloss, however, considerably overstates that Court's reliance on contemporary attitudes. What the Glucksberg Court did was to note that democratic action in many states had recently reaffirmed assisted-suicide bans, thus buttressing the Court's conclusion that assisted suicide is not deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the nation. 521 U.S. at 716-19, 117 S.Ct. at 2265-67. But the existence of this contemporary practice was never essential to that conclusion. That is, the Court never suggested that a lack of contemporary reinforcement of the prohibition on assisted suicide would have led it to a contrary conclusion. 43 The district court's interpretation also overlooks the context of Glucksberg 's contemporary practice analysis. The Court began its examination of history and tradition by inquiring whether this asserted right has any place in our Nation's traditions. Id. at 723, 117 S.Ct. at 2269 (emphasis added). Having found that it did not, the Court had no need to proceed to the further question of whether that right was deeply rooted in those traditions (nor whether it was implicit in the concept of ordered liberty). Part of the reason the Court was able to dismiss the asserted right so summarily was because it found that the prohibition on assisted suicide continues explicitly to the present. Id. In short, the democratic action cited by Glucksberg was merely one factor among many disproving the claim that assisted suicide is a deeply rooted right. 14 44
45 The district court's central holding — its discovery of a constitutional right to use sexual devices like ... vibrators, dildos, anal beads, and artificial vaginas — was not based on any evidence of a history and tradition of affirmative protection of this right. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d at 1296. The district court's lengthy opinion cites no reference to such a right in the usual repositories of our freedoms, such as federal and state constitutional provisions, constitutional doctrines, statutory provisions, common-law doctrines, and the like. Instead, the critical evidence for the district court was the relative scarcity of statutes explicitly banning sexual devices and the rarity of reported cases of sexual-devices prosecutions — along with various factual assertions from declarations by the ACLU's experts. From this, the district court inferred that history and contemporary practice demonstrate a conscious avoidance of regulation of [sexual] devices by the states. Id. at 1296. 46 This negative inference essentially inverted Glucksberg 's history and tradition inquiry. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 721, 117 S.Ct. at 2268. The district court — rather than requiring a showing that the right to use sexual devices is deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition, id. — looked for a showing that proscriptions against sexual devices are deeply rooted in history and tradition. Under this approach, the freedom to smoke, to pollute, to engage in private discrimination, to commit marital rape — at one time or another — all could have been elevated to fundamental-rights status. Moreover, it would create the perverse incentive for legislatures to regulate every area within their plenary power for fear that their restraint in any area might give rise to a right of constitutional proportions. 47 Beyond these obvious objections, the most significant flaw in the district court's analysis is its misreading of Glucksberg. Admittedly, the Glucksberg Court, in declining to extend constitutional protection to assisted suicide, cited the extensive history of laws forbidding or discouraging suicide. But the context of this inquiry was the Court's attempt to determine whether a right to suicide, and particularly assisted suicide, was deeply rooted in American history and tradition. Naturally, prohibitions on suicide were particularly competent evidence of the absence of such a history and tradition. The Glucksberg Court, however, never suggested that the reviewing court must find a history of proscription of a given activity before declining to recognize a new constitutional right to engage in that activity. Id. at 710-16, 117 S.Ct. at 2262-65; see also id. at 725, 117 S.Ct. at 2270 (rejecting the analogy between the constitutionally-protected right to refuse unwanted medical treatment and the asserted right to assisted suicide, noting that the former right has never enjoyed similar legal protection). 48 In short, nothing in Glucksberg indicates that an absence of historical prohibition is tantamount, for purposes of fundamental-rights analysis, to an historical record of protection under the law. To the contrary, the Glucksberg standard expressly requires a showing that the asserted right is deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if [it] were sacrificed. Id. at 721, 117 S.Ct. at 2268. Not only does the record before us fail to evidence such a deeply rooted right, but it suggests that, to the extent that sex toys historically have attracted the attention of the law, it has been in the context of proscription, not protection. 49 The chief example of this proscription is the Comstock Laws, federal and state legislation adopted in the late 1800s. The federal Comstock Act of 1873 was a criminal statute directed at the suppression of Trade in and Circulation of obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use. See Bolger v. Youngs Drug Prods. Corp., 463 U.S. 60, 70, 103 S.Ct. 2875, 2882, 77 L.Ed.2d 469 (1983) (quoting Act of March 3, 1873, ch. 258, § 2, 17 Stat. 599 (1873)). The Act prohibited importation of and use of the mails for transporting, among other things, every article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use. United States v. Chase, 135 U.S. 255, 257, 10 S.Ct. 756, 756, 34 L.Ed. 117 (1890). Various states also enacted similar statutes prohibiting the sale of such articles. See, e.g., Conn. Gen.Stat. § 1325 (1902); Mass. Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 272 § 21 (West 2004) (passed 1879). 50 The district court, however, discounted the significance of the Comstock laws, describing them as aberrant to the sexual privacy generally afforded to consensual, adult sexual conduct. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d. at 1286. The district court cited expert declarations offered by the ACLU to the effect that the Comstock laws were not motivated primarily by a desire to ban sexual devices. Id. The district court further noted that searches of the annotations to the Comstock Act and of Federal Cases found no references to cases involving dildos and vibrators. Id. at 1287. 51 Even if these prohibitions on sexual devices were not widespread or vigorously enforced, their mere existence significantly undermines the argument that sexual devices historically have been free from state interference. Moreover, the lack of statutory references to sexual devices is relatively meaningless without evidence that commerce in these devices was sufficiently widespread, or sufficiently in the public eye, to merit legislative attention, at least beyond general anti-obscenity laws. Likewise, the focus on searches of federal case reporters for references to vibrators or dildos assumes, unjustifiably, that reported cases are reliable proxies for actual prosecutions, the vast majority of which would have never appeared in the court reporters (it also overlooks the possibility of prosecutions under state law). It also overlooks the possibility that traditional sensibilities and mores restrained courts from explicitly mentioning particular sexual devices in the text of judicial opinions. 52 In light of these realities, the negative inference drawn by the district court — that the scarcity of explicit reference to sexual devices in statutory schemes and reported cases reflects a deliberate non-interference, id. at 1286 — is too speculative a basis for constitutionalizing a hitherto unrecognized right. This is especially true given the lack of any indicia of affirmative protection under the law. In short, there is no competent evidence in the record before us indicating that the lack of explicit and aggressive proscription of sex toys was, as the district court surmised, conscious avoidance of regulation of these devices by the states. Id. at 1296.
53
54 Finally, we note our recognition of the district court's uncritical acceptance of the bare assertions contained in the ACLU's expert declarations — particularly in reaching conclusions outside, or even in apparent contradiction to, the documented historical record. 55 This perfunctory reliance was especially pronounced in the district court's deconstruction of the Comstock laws. The mere existence of both federal and state Comstock laws — especially the federal Comstock Act, which expressly prohibited importation and mail transport of every article ... for ... immoral use — seriously undermines the ACLU's fundamental-rights argument under Glucksberg. Instead, the district court's review of the Comstock laws led it to the conclusion that [t]he popularity, legality, and ease of access to sexual devices like vibrators and dildos further demonstrate that the firm legislative respect for sexual privacy in the marital relationship extended to deliberate non-interference with adults' use of sexual devices within those relationships. Id. at 1286. 56 The sole support for this rather cursory conclusion appears to have been the assertions of one Rachel Maines, an historian and author, who submitted two separate expert declarations on the ACLU's behalf. R3-56, Ex. A; R4-84, Ex. 4. Her declarations offered criticism of the Alabama statute going well beyond her specific expertise and delving into the legal and policy dimensions of the case: 57 Laws like Alabama's that target the appearance, packaging or marketing of [sexual] devices, rather than their functionality, thus do not prevent or mitigate the supposed evil of commerce of sexual stimulation and auto-eroticism, for its own sake (Brief of Alabama Attorney General, 21). Their effect is merely to benefit one set of retailers (drug stores, health food stores, and discount houses such as Walmart, GNC and Target) at the expense of another (marital aids vendors). 58 R3-56, Ex. A at 18-21. 59 On the historical record, if devices designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of the human genital organs represent an evil and/or a moral threat to the citizens of Alabama, the state has been remarkably dilatory in making this discovery, having waited for something more than two and a half millennia from the invention of the dildo and more than a century from the invention of the electromechanical vibrator to legislate against them. Apparently unconcerned about the availability of vibrators to consumers beginning in 1899, and even about their use in the production of orgasm in women, for which there was ample evidence by 1930, the state did not act against these devices until a small percentage of them took on anatomical forms, and until they began to be associated with a new interest in orgasmic mutuality in heterosexual relationships. Significantly, Viagra, which enhances sexual experience for men but not necessarily for women, is legal by prescription in all states, including those with laws against vibrators and dildos. As an historian and as a citizen, I fail to see what legitimate purpose is served by institutionalizing an hypocrisy in which the sale of a standard and traditional therapeutic device is rendered unlawful by sexual references in appearance, packaging or marketing. 60 Id. at 23-25. 61 Although Maines's statements suggest an agenda inconsistent with an unbiased and complete historical presentation, the district court nevertheless repeatedly relied on her factual assertions, usually without any independent verification. We note several typical examples: 62 &#x2022; In downplaying the historical significance of the Comstock laws, the district court emphasized that sexual devices were not the impetus for the so-called Comstock Acts. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d at 1286. The only support for this statement was Maines's declaration statement that vibrators and dildoes [sic] were not significant motivations for the passage and enforcement of the Comstock Act. R4-84, Ex. 4 at 2. However, we find in neither Maines's declaration nor the record elsewhere any evidence — aside from Maines's bare assertion — of the actual motivation behind passage and enforcement of the Act. 63 &#x2022; The record before the district court contained evidence that, according to records maintained by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, between 1871 and 1881, some 64,836 Articles of immoral use, of rubber, etc. were seized under the Comstock Act and other anti-vice laws. See Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young 137 (Robert Bremner ed., Harvard University Press 1967) (1884). The district court, however, dismissed this evidence by quoting Maines's claim that these were almost all contraceptives. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d at 1286; R4-84, Ex. 4 at 3. Although our own review of the record confirms that the articles of rubber likely represented many condoms, our concern is the district court's casual dismissal of contemporaneous documentary evidence in favor of retrospective, and unsupported, characterizations of that evidence. Further, although Maines cited several authorities for her assertion, our review of her sources finds no support for the conclusion that the referenced articles were almost all contraceptives. 15 64 &#x2022; The district court's central holding — its discovery of a constitutional right to use sexual devices like ... vibrators, dildos, anal beads, and artificial vaginas — was based largely on unsupported statements from Maines's declarations. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d at 1296. In divining this right, the district court concluded that history and contemporary practice demonstrate a conscious avoidance of regulation of [sexual] devices by the states, Id. This conclusion was based on the emergence and widespread acceptance of the electric vibrator, id. at 1283, and [t]he popularity, legality, and ease of access to sexual devices like vibrators and dildos, id. at 1286. These findings in turn relied on Maines's declarations, particularly her assertion that [v]ibrators remained legal throughout this period, and were mailable matter under the Comstock laws of 1873 — 1914. Id. What both Maines's declaration and the district court's opinion omit is the fact that, according to Maines's own writings elsewhere, the vibrators available on the market during this period were general purpose vibrators marketed for non-sexual uses, such as massaging the hands, face, back, and neck. 16 The fact that these general purpose vibrators were legal and mailable is hardly probative of the legality of sexual devices as sexual devices. 65 Because of our conclusion supra that the constitutionality of Alabama's statute does not hinge on the enforcement, or lack thereof, of the Comstock laws, any error by the district court in its incorporation of Maines's litigation-motivated and litigation-tailored assertions was harmless. Nevertheless, the district court's truth-seeking duties should have compelled it to go behind Maines's assertions and satisfy itself of their reliability before relying on those assertions in recognizing a new fundamental constitutional right. 17 66 Moreover, this uncritical reliance on Maines's assertions appears to have been typical of a larger pattern. For example, the district court's history and tradition discussion was largely a paraphrased version of the ACLU's motion for summary judgment and its factual support appears to have consisted entirely of the ACLU's pleadings and selective appendices of historical interpretations of sex throughout American history. Of the 104 supporting footnotes in the district court's history and tradition analysis, 99 were citations to these pleadings and appendices. 67
68 The district court's rationale for its wholesale adoption of the ACLU's evidence appears to have been its mistaken view that the Alabama Attorney General had conceded the ACLU's evidence on the history and tradition question. The district court, as preface to its Glucksberg history and tradition analysis, stated that the court notes that it is extremely significant, if not dispositive, that the Attorney General concedes that `there is little evidence to show that sexual devices, or consensual sexual activities in general, have historically been subject to governmental regulation.' Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d. at 1277 (quoting Attorney General's Memorandum in Support of Motion for Summary Judgment, at 16). 69 This not only misquoted the Attorney General's actual language, but mischaracterized it as a concession. In his memorandum supporting his motion for summary judgment, the Attorney General had devoted a section to describing Victorian-era proscriptions, and enforcement thereof, on sexual devices. R3-78 at 14-16. The following section began, Although there is little additional evidence to show that sexual devices, or consensual sexual activities in general, have historically been subject to governmental regulation, there is also no evidence to show that these activities have been specially protected under the law. Id. at 16 (emphasis added). That section went on to mention some of that additional evidence, such as efforts by the states to restrict sexual devices. Id. The district court's omission of the critical word additional, as well as its out-of-context quotation of a prefatory dependent clause, significantly altered the meaning of a statement that, in proper context, appears in no way to have been intended as a concession of one of the most significant and contested issues in the case. 70 Similarly, the district court elsewhere stated: The Attorney General concedes that `there is no genuine dispute as to the historical chronology set forth by the plaintiffs' experts,' to the effect that there is a `history or tradition of state non-interference in persons sex lives.' Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d. at 1276 (quoting Attorney General's Memorandum in Support of Motion for Summary Judgment, at 16). 71 In fact, the Attorney General conceded only to the historical chronology set forth by the ACLU's experts and the liberalization of attitudes towards sex that this chronology demonstrated. R3-78 at 12. However, the Attorney General never conceded a history or tradition of state non-interference in persons sex lives. Significantly, the Attorney General's use of that phrase appeared four sentences prior to the chronology concession and itself was part of a sentence disputing the ACLU's version of history and tradition: In attempting to demonstrate a `history' or `tradition' of state non-interference in persons' sex lives, [the ACLU's] experts have proffered a lengthy history of sexuality. Id. The district court's omission of the quotation marks surrounding history and tradition particularly distorted the Attorney General's meaning. 72 The district court's reliance on these concessions appears to have been substantial. In announcing its holding that the ACLU's evidence demonstrated a fundamental right to sexual privacy, the district court stressed that [t]he Attorney General has conceded plaintiffs' evidence in this regard. Williams III, 220 F.Supp.2d. at 1294; see also id. at 1295 (Given the breadth, depth, volume, and weight of that evidence, and the Attorney General's concession, this court is compelled to agree [with plaintiffs-appellees].); id. at 1295-96 (holding that, in light of the ACLU's evidence and the concession to this evidence by the Attorney General, this court concludes that plaintiffs have met their burden). 73 To the contrary, the Attorney General's pleadings, while not disputing much of the ACLU's evidence about the liberalization of sexual norms, vigorously disputed both (a) the legal ramifications of that liberalization (e.g., that this liberalization, in itself, satisfied the fundamental-rights threshold) as well as (b) the contention that sexual devices had gone virtually unregulated throughout American history. R3-78 at 12-20. We conclude, however, that the district court's reliance on these putative concessions was, at worst, harmless error. The issues that the district court treated as having been conceded pertained to the existence of a fundamental right to sexual privacy, which, as we explained supra, was an over-broad framing of the inquiry in the first place.