![]() ![]() That echoes something my partners and I said throughout the pandemic: How can a medical treatment be “safe and effective” if there are known side effects and potentially serious safety issues? How can it be unreasonable for people - especially firefighters, who must meet rigorous fitness standards - to say they do not want to put that substance in their body? And how can judges, especially judges in California, which has a state constitutional right to privacy that explicitly protects a person’s interest in bodily autonomy, ignore those concerns? How can they kick those people out of court before they have had a chance to litigate? And, as to the shots’ safety, the court of appeal explained that “the documents the trial court judicially noticed repeatedly stated the vaccines were ‘safe,’ but they also acknowledged ‘common side effects’ and ‘rare’ but ‘serious safety problems.’” had relied on in the case said public health officials did not know how effective the Covid shots would be, especially against the omicron variant, much less future Covid variants. ![]() ![]() The appellate court criticized the judge’s efforts to circumvent California’s pleading rules in taking judicial notice that the Covid shots are “safe and effective.” The appellate court noted that “the court did not explain what it meant by ‘safe’ or ‘effective.’”įor example, many of the government documents the City of L.A. Linfield did not do that in the firefighters’ case. In a California state court, a plaintiff who pays the filing fee and alleges facts that, assumed to be true, state any plausible claim, gets to gather evidence and present that evidence to a judge or jury. Those standards are famously low, lower than the federal standards, which the Supreme Court, led by its conservatives, keeps heightening. After all, the California Code of Judicial Ethics requires that they “uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary.” It requires that they “perform the duties of judicial office impartially, competently and diligently.”Īt minimum, that meant applying California’s pleading standards faithfully. (I litigated one of the first successful lockdown-related cases against Newsom, for a coalition of gym owners who challenged California’s arbitrary closure of gyms during the early stages of the pandemic.) Judges should have known better. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden, establishment puppets who lacked the discipline or intellectual curiosity to question public health alarmists. We might have expected that from politicians like California Gov. Unfortunately, the left abandoned their principles during the pandemic. He quoted two of the United States’ most liberal jurists, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, who wrote in a famous dissent that “grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” In fact, the lower-court judge in the firefighters’ case, Michael Linfield, wrote a book about this. As I have written before, leftist institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the California judiciary have always championed individual freedom, even in emergency situations (“emergency” being a term of art that is subject to manipulation, of course). Although unpublished, the appellate court’s 53-page opinion marks a pivotal moment in the fallout from Covid policy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |