Re: Talk of Banning Research into Human Cloning (fwd)

[bill.stewart@pobox.com]

At 11:02 AM 1/13/98 -0800, Tim May wrote:
>As I have made clear, I don't believe "banning research" which is neither
>"commerce between the states" nor a direct harm to others (as the "robbery"
>example Michael Froomkin used earlier as a parallel is), is supported by
>the Constitution.

There are different degrees of UnConstitutionalness.  Some things are so
blatantly off the edge that even if Congress passed them, they'd be laughed
out of the first court that addressed them, like banning plant-growing
or discrete mathematics or arresting everybody with Japanese ancestors.
Others are much grayer areas, where court cases addressing them 
would take a long time and cost a lot of money, which can be prohibitively
expensive for the early phases of research.

>And if the cloning ban is a ban on research in certain areas, as many are
>pushing for (but, again, the final laws have not been proposed, much less
>passed, so we'll have to wait), then is this not prior restraint on
>publishing?

At least for the US, the important issue is that Congress hasn't passed 
any laws, nor do they need to - this is a speechmaking opp for Clinton,
and maybe for a few right-wing or left-wing Congresscritters,
so they can all sound concerned about this scary new technology,
and so the public will remember that they feel our pain.

A much more realistic, and Constitutional, possibility is that the Feds
will ban use of Federal money for cloning research.  As a civil
libertarian, I think that's just fine, and they should do the same
to other controversial research, like nuclear weapons and fetal parts,
for which significant fractions of the public don't want to be forced
to fund those activities they believe to be immoral or dangerous.

Alternatively, [Note: End of serious section] they could use the
confiscatory tax model pioneered with the machine gun and marihuana bans -
the tax on cloning body parts is an arm and a leg, but if you
clone an entire human it'll cost you your firstborn child...
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639