Our friend and colleague Norberto Padilla passed away in his native Buenos Aires from complications following stomach surgery. He was 76. He was serving as president of the Latin American Consortium for Religious Freedom at the time of his death. He was a founding member of that Consortium and also of the Argentine Council on Religious Liberty (CALIR). He worked closely in partnership with the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU. (more…)
This note from our dean, Gordon Smith, to the BYU Law School Community, is reprinted with permission, and our gratitude.
Dear Law School Community,
Each time I enter our law building, I see an art exhibit captioned “Human Dignity for Everyone Everywhere.” The exhibit features stunning portraits of people from Ecuador, France, Mongolia, Niger, and Pakistan by renowned photographer Steve McCurry. The title of the exhibit alludes to the Punta del Este Declaration on Human Dignity for Everyone Everywhere, which has been promoted by the Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies on the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to remember, reaffirm, and recommit to the notion that “equal human dignity of everyone everywhere is the foundational principle of human rights and reminds us that every person is of value and is worthy of respect.”
Justin Collings is Associate Dean for Research and Academic Affairs and Francis R. Kirkham Professor of Law in the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University.
On 26 February 2020, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the state cannot criminalize assisted suicide. The judgment struck down § 217 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch), which made it a crime to offer assisted suicide as a professionalized service. (The law did not apply to individual doctors who helped their patients to end their lives.)
The basis of the Court’s ruling was Article 2(1) of the German Basic Law, which enshrines the right to the free development of one’s personality, in connection with Article 1(1), which proclaims the sacrosanctity of human dignity. Across several decades, the Court has derived from these two provisions a robust series of constituent rights—the general personality right (allgemeine Persönlichkeitsrecht); the general freedom of action (allgemeine Handlungsfreiheit), which extends to virtually every human act or admission; the right of informational self-determination (Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung); the right to the integrity of information systems; the right to state recognition of the gender with which one identifies; and more. Now the Court has added to this list the right to take one’s own life and, as needed, to secure other’s assistance toward that end. (more…)