Reflections on the Hobby Lobby Decision
Last June, on the last day of the Supreme
Court term, it issued sits decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding, inter alia, that a business corporation
could deprive its employees of certain contraceptive benefits mandated by the Affordable
Care Act based upon the religious objections thereto held by the corporation’s
shareholders. For reasons I detailed in
an article published in the William and Mary Business Law Review, A Corporation Has No Soul – The Business
Entity Law Response to Challenges to the PPACA Contraceptive Mandate, I entirely
disagree with the Court’s reasoning in this decision. CLICK HERE TO LINK TO THAT ARTICLE.
One especially unsatisfactory aspect of the decision was the
assertion by the majority that in fact it is a very narrow decision and would
not have broad application. This
possibility of broad application was
highlighted by Justice Ginsburg in her dissent, and was the point raised in my
article that was cited to the US Supreme Court in an amicus brief filed by a
group of business law professors.
Essentially, if a corporation can deprive its employees of otherwise
statutorily mandated contraceptive coverage, there exists no analytic basis by
which the company owned by the observant Jehovah's Witness cannot require
exclusion from the employee’s insurance plan of blood transfusions, that the
corporation owned by a devout Muslim should not be able to refuse to cover the
transplant of a pig valve into an employee’s heart or the Scientologist owned
company should not be permitted to exclude from its insurance plan coverage for
psychiatric care.
In a recent article by Jeffrey Toobin published in the New
Yorker magazine, he suggest that, based upon recent reliance upon the Hobby Lobby decision by various
individuals asserting they should not have to comply with an otherwise existing
legal obligation because of their religious belief’s, Justice Ginsburg was
right.
No comments:
Post a Comment