Court Opinion

ID: 9653582
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:49:18.357033+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:00.105591
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
If the decision had been left to me alone, I should have felt more strongly than my brothers the force of the Senate amendment in the original act, and of the use of the word, “unlawful,” as it passed. There seems to me substantial reason for saying that contraconceptives were meant to be forbidden, whether or not prescribed by physicians, and that no lawful use of them was contemplated. Many people have changed their minds about such matters in sixty years, büt the act forbids the same conduct now as then; a statute stands until public feeling gets enough momentum to change it, which may be long after a majority would repeal it, if a poll were taken. Nevertheless, I am not prepared to dissent. I recognize that the course of the act through Congress does not tell us very much, and it is of considerable importance that the law as to importations should be the same as that as to the mails; we ought not impute differences of intention upon slight distinctions in expression. I am content therefore to accept my brothers’ judgment, whatever might have been, and indeed still are, my doubts.