Trubek Article Citation

"This made my whole day! Thank you! I wrote this piece on a cross-country flight. It remains one of the best writing experiences I've ever had! The words and argument literally flowed out of my fingertips. Not the usually experience of panicked fits and starts." 

Well, you made my day too, Prof. Murray. I referenced the article (which is about Griswold) myself sometime a while back, and she must have done some sort of name/subject search since she found it. And, thanked me. This time I replied to someone who cited it on Twitter. Turns out the article is special to her. Well, I do try to do something nice for people from to time.

Trubek v. Ullman impressed me as a road not taken. Justice White cited it in his Griswold concurrence as an example of the law burdening a marrying couple's "considerations of family planning." The Trubeks were a young couple who felt it inappropriate at that time to have a child but that normal sexual relations were an important part of marriage. Birth control would allow both, husband and wife, to choose a professional path fitting their own moral principles.

[The article cites an op-ed the wife wrote fifty years later, which I linked in the thread too.]

Griswold is a sort of artificial case with named plaintiffs involved in a birth control clinic. Their arrest burdened married couples. But, like the article notes, we do not get a sense of any married couples involved. 

The set of cases involved under the overall Poe v. Ullman rubric did have married couples. Justice Douglas references this in his dissent. Trubek provides the open-ended reach here, helping to show the full potential of a "right to marry" and make choices involving children.

And, yes, "privacy and equality could co-exist." That was a lesson for Justice Kennedy, flawed as he might have been. He repeatedly linked due process (liberty) and equal protection concerns. The subject is complex. It is why I have for so long -- if more like thirty-five years -- been so interested in the complexity of abortion and related subjects.

I did know about the chapter/book also recommended to me. I actually went to an event where the three editors talked about it. I read more than one book in that constitutional stories series. The book is just a bit pricy. I can get it through someone I know so guess it's time -- eventually -- to read it.