LI Songfeng is Associate Professor, School of Law, China University of Political Science and Law. He received his PhD from Tsinghua University. He was a member of the inaugural class of the Young Scholars Fellowship on…
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…)
Greg Marcar is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago, where he is also a Teaching Fellow within the Theology program. Greg is a 2019 alumnus of the ICLRS Religion and the Rule of Law Young Scholars Fellowship Program.
This post is derived from Marcar’s article “Revisiting Death’s Difference: The Philosophical Anthropology of the U.S. Death Penalty and the Impossibility of Capital Due Process”, British Journal of American Legal Studies | Ahead of Print, 21 April 2020.
Introduction
Few judicial issues are as polarising in the U.S. as the death penalty. Akin perhaps to abortion, attitudes towards capital punishment can often approximate a litmus test for liberal and conservative dispositions. For many of its legal and political opponents, the death penalty is a quintessentially disproportionate punishment, and thus contrary to the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.” For many of its supporters, the death penalty is not only congruent with the Eighth Amendment (particularly under a historically-focussed “originalist” reading);[1] it also instantiates the moral principle that those who commit the most horrendous acts within society must face the ultimate sanction. Between these positions, the possibilities for mediation appear slim. This is also true within religious thought, where assertions concerning the dignity of every human being and the value of forgiveness are often mirrored by equally forceful assertions concerning the sanctity of human life and the need for a retributive punishment of murderers which reflects this sanctity.[2] (more…)