Salon | January 22, 2022
“Supreme Court justices from any era have very little understanding of science and public health,” Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in public health law and has written about the case, told Salon by email. “But the Court in Jacobson understood it had little scientific expertise and therefore deferred to the decision of public health agencies. The modern Supreme Court suffers from arrogance that wasn’t evident in 1905. They brazenly substituted their judgment for that of experienced public health agencies. The Court in its oral arguments made egregious errors about COVID transmission and vaccinations.”