Jeanna Norris, et al. v. Samuel L. Stanley, Jr., in His Official Capacity as President of Michigan State University, et al.

“Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale.” Arizona v. Mayorkas, 143 S.Ct. 1312, 1314 (2023) (Gorsuch, J., statement). Among these decisions were various “vaccine mandates” which required Americans to choose between receiving a vaccine and maintaining their jobs. Making matters worse, these mandates were not grounded in basic scientific facts about mechanisms of immunity. Instead, they cherry-picked advice of various public health officials (and then sought shelter in that cherry-picked advice), entirely ignoring fundamental liberty interests in avoiding unwanted, unproven, and often unnecessary medical treatment. The courts routinely upheld these mandates on the sole authority of this Court’s more than century-old decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), reasoning that supposed “public health” measures, even ones that directly impinge on individuals’ bodily autonomy, are lawful so long as the government has a rational basis for such mandates. In so doing, lower courts failed to engage with the facts of Jacobson and ignored more than a century of case law since its issuance. This Court’s intervention is needed to clarify that government orders which seek to override individuals’ decisions about their own health and bodily autonomy must satisfy heightened scrutiny.