Pope Francis’s Statement Endorsing Same-Sex Civil Unions Undermines the Moral Legitimacy and Legal Arguments in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

DAVID S. KEMP, CHARLES E. BINKLEY

David S. Kemp, a professor at Berkeley Law, and Charles E. Binkley, MD, the director of bioethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, consider the implications of Pope Francis’s recently revealed statement endorsing same-sex civil unions as they pertain to a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Kemp and Binkley argue that the Pope’s statement undermines the moral legitimacy of the Catholic organization’s position and casts a shadow on the premise of its legal arguments.

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Stigma and the Oral Argument in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

LESLIE C. GRIFFIN

UNLV Boyd School of Law professor Leslie C. Griffin explains why stigma is a central concept that came up during oral argument before the Supreme Court in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. Griffin points out that some religions have long supported racial discrimination, citing their religious texts, but courts prohibited such discrimination, even by religious entities. Griffin argues that just as religious organizations should not enjoy religious freedom to stigmatize people of color, so they should not be able to discriminate—and thus stigmatize—people based on sexual orientation.

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Adams v. American Optical Corp.

Docket: 19-1609

Opinion Date: November 6, 2020

Judge: Floyd

Areas of Law: Personal Injury

The Fourth Circuit affirmed the district court's order granting summary judgment for defendants, holding that plaintiff filed his personal injury suit outside the applicable two-year statute of limitations. Plaintiff, a coal miner, alleged that the respirators given to him by defendants to protect himself from inhaling excessive amounts of harmful coal dust failed to protect him from the lung disease that he developed. Applying Virginia law, the court held that there is no genuine dispute of material fact that plaintiff's coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) first manifested itself before September 29, 2014. Furthermore, the fact that earlier doctors could not have known his eventual diagnosis when exploring other causes of plaintiff's poor lung function does not create a genuine dispute as to the consistent medical opinion delivered by the experts in this case: plaintiff had CWP prior to September 29, 2014. Therefore, the court is bound to affirm the district court's correct conclusion that the limitations period did not begin to run on October 2, 2014, the date plaintiff first discovered he had CWP. The court noted that it would be remiss in remaining silent about the manifest unfairness that the court's conclusion poses to plaintiffs, like the one here, who suffer from latent diseases that cause ambiguous symptoms for the first two years or successive harms that fall outside the limitations window. The court therefore joined other state and federal courts in recognizing that Virginia law essentially bars certain plaintiffs from recovery.