Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 On 2 July 1980, the U.S. supreme court voided the benzene limit on the grounds that OSHA had not sufficiently quantified its claims of benzene's dangers. It was an anniversary of sorts. On a July day exactly seventy-one years earlier, in a Baltimore hospital less than fifty miles away from the supreme court building where the decision was handed down, the fourteen-year-old glue worker had lain dying from benzene-caused anemia. |
Melody Petersen
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 That same year the supreme court unleashed a deluge of industrial science by allowing the first patent to be placed on a living organism, a bacterium genetically engineered by a scientist at General Electric to devour oil spilled into the sea. Patents are vital to industry. They give inventors monopolies on products by preventing competitors from selling them for twenty years. The Supreme Court's ruling reversed that of the U.S. Patent Office, which had long held that living things could not be patented. The decision opened the door to the patenting of genes, cell lines, tissues, and organs. |
Devra Davis
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 Supreme Court. A Virginia court had ruled that the state could sterilize both an institutionalized seventeen-year-old girl, Carrie Buck, and her seven-month-old infant daughter, Vivian. Carrie Buck's mother, Emma, an epileptic, resided in the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, along with her daughter and young granddaughter. U.S. supreme court Justices Louis Brandeis, William HowardTaft and Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927 endorsed the decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize all of them. |
Michael Pollan
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 Many consumers regarded "oleomargarine" as just such an adulteration, and in the late 1800s five states passed laws requiring that all butter imitations be dyed pink so no one would be fooled. The supreme court struck down the laws in 1898. In retrospect, had the practice survived, it might have saved some lives.
The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules requiring that the word "imitation" appear on any food product that was, well, an imitation. Read today, the official rationale behind the imitation rule seems at once commonsen-sical and quaint: "... |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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| In the dissenting supreme court opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall cogently warned, "In recent years there has been increasing recognition that the products of technological development may have harmful effects whose incidence and severity cannot be predicted with certainty. . . . Risks of harm are often uncertain, but inaction has considerable costs of its own."39
Overexposure to benzene continued unabated. One year later, in October 1981, another meeting on benzene was convened by IARC in Lyon. |
| The legal battle was tied up in the courts for years, going all the way to the U.S. supreme court.70 In a 1956 split decision (with Warren, Black, and Douglas dissenting), the Court sided with DuPont. Much of the case centered on whether wax paper, aluminum foil, and cellophane all constituted the same market. The lower court trial judge went so far as to visit the 1952 Annual Packaging Show at Atlantic City in order to research this issue personally. DuPont won its case, but Saran Wrap and other noncellophane plastics, such as polypropylene, were about to make the issue irrelevant. |
| In June 1971, the United States supreme court sided with OSHA in a landmark decision finding that a cost-benefit rationale was not required by OSHA in promulgating protective standards, as long as those standards were feasible. The Court's five-to-three decision, in an opinion delivered by Justice Brennan, documents that at the time of the new standard, an estimated hundred thousand U.S. active or retired workers suffered from byssinosis, thirty-five thousand of whom had advanced disease. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| The supreme court allowed biotech research to be patented.
• 1981 —The legislature gave pharmaceuticals huge tax breaks for funding university research. The fact that the industry gave not only money, but guidelines for its use set the stage for privatization and direction of tax supported research.
• 1982 —To spur the economy, billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research was given to private corporations.
• 1992 —President Bush (the elder), a former Lilly board member, signed a prescription drug user fee act that expanded the FDA staff by having pharmaceuticals pay an application fee. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Back then, it was a branch of law that few lawyers had mastered, or indeed wanted any part of, because of a supreme court ruling that limited the amount the courts could award patients who sued their insurers for denial of coverage. "There was no pot of gold for the lawyer," says Philipson, "and most people don't have the money to pay you. You have to go to the courts to get paid."
Her new client's name was Ricki, a forty-eight-year-old psychologist with a child still in high school and an advanced case of breast cancer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The whole problem of genetically engineered crops became a tidal wave of trouble following the U.S. Supreme Court's ill-fated decision in 1980 to allow corporations to patent life. The patenting of the first genetically engineered microbe opened the floodgates to corporate greed, and it wasn't long before Big Ag firms began patenting every seed they could get their hands on (a process called "biopiracy"), stealing the inventions of nature and declaring them to be their own.
Today, an astonishing 20 percent of the human genome is now owned by corporations. |
Connie Bennett, C.H.H.C. with Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 Although the case was later settled, the California supreme court ruled that ads implicitly claiming that cereals are healthful or nutritious made potential targets for litigation.
Now, lawyers on both sides are gearing up for many more such cases. "I think collectively food and obesity are going to be the next Big Tobacco," asserts John Banzhaf III, who pioneered lawsuits against the tobacco industry and led the fight to remove cigarette advertising from TV. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Justice Edward Greenfield of the New York State supreme court rules that parents do not have the right to volunteer their mentally incapacitated children for non-therapeutic medical research studies and that no mentally incapacitated person whatsoever can be used in a medical experiment without informed consent (Sharav).
(1996)
Professor Adil E. Shamoo of the University of Maryland and the organization Citizens for Responsible Care and Research sends a written testimony on the unethical use of veterans in medical research to the U.S. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| A series of suits, culminating in a case heard before the supreme court in 1996, finally convinced the FDA that if pharmaceutical companies ever challenged its restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising, the agency might well lose the case. In 1997, it issued a draft rule, finalized two years later, permitting companies to boil down the brief summary to a few seconds for broadcast advertisements, thus opening the gates to Zoloft cartoon ads during prime-time sitcoms and Ambien ads on the nightly news. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 In an 1893 ruling of the U.S. supreme court, the tomato became legally classified as a vegetable because it's
Tomato-Eating Men Have Fewer Prostate Cancers
Cooked tomatoes, especially those cooked with oil, are a rich source of the carotenoid lycopene. There is promising research showing that lycopene is associated with significant reduction in prostate cancer. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 Although diaphragms and condoms gradually became more readily available (the first diaphragms in use in America were smuggled from Europe through Canada by Sanger and her husband), it was not until the supreme court decision Griswald v. Connecticut in 1966 that married women's rights to access birth control became assured. |
Devra Davis
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| In
1980, the supreme court ruled against the standard, arguing that the agency had failed to prove that this low level would provide measurable health benefits in workers. Basically, the court threw out the idea that any exposure to a cancer-causing substance increased the risk of the disease. It demanded evidence that only time and money and epidemiologists can produce. The Court insisted that sufficient numbers of sick or dead workers had to be assembled to provide proof that harm had already happened before allowing the agency to act to prevent further harms. |
| In fact, studies led by the National Cancer Institute, conducted by researchers in China and the University of California at Berkeley and published in 2005, have finally provided what the supreme court asked for two decades ago. Looking at the workplaces and health of thousands of workers in more than 700 factories in 12 cities in China, Martyn Smith and colleagues have found a number of disorders of the bone marrow, including cancer, clearly worsened in those with greater exposures. |
| The "Most Influential supreme court Ruling You've Never Heard Of" is the title of an essay by a group of scholars and scientists dismayed at changes in the way the courts handle admissible evidence.46 A radical shift occurred with the 1993 decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. This ruling turned judges into scientific referees in charge of deciding what's fair and foul scientific information. |
| Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis, William HowardTaft and Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927 endorsed the decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize all of them.27
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.Three generations ofimbeciles are enough. |
| First, racism didn't stop with President Harry Truman's integration of the armed forces at the end of World War II or with the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Some union officers and public health officials seriously asked whether black workers were inherently more vulnerable to lung cancer. Today we know that the gene pool of black Americans is more similar to that of white Americans than to that of blacks in many different parts of Africa or the Caribbean.42 But in those days, thinking about skin color and genes was guided by simplistic notions. |
Charles Barber
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 In 1927, the supreme court, by an eight-to-one margin, approved the sterilization of moral defectives. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his decision, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."6 Editorials in The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine endorsed the practice. By 1945, 45,000 Americans had been sterilized, 21,000 of whom were psychiatric patients in state facilities. |
Michele Simon
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 Government restrictions on commercial advertising can indeed be constitutional, as long as they meet the legal test established by the supreme court.
It's true that in recent years the supreme court has gravitated toward a more strict interpretation of the commercial speech doctrine, and has thus been loath to allow too much government restriction of advertising. Most notably, in 2001, the Court declared unconstitutional a Massachusetts law banning, among other things, outdoor tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools or playgrounds. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This premise was upheld by the supreme court of the United States in the case: John Bad Elk v. U.S., 177 U.S. 529.
Why onlookers did nothing
The sad fact of this matter is that the onlookers did nothing because Americans have been terrorized by their own government to fear authority and follow orders. Americans fear their government. That alone is a dangerous situation, since the balance of power in a free society actually depends on a government fearing the people!
When the people fear their government, that government has complete power over the people. |
Dawson Church
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 President "Wilson pushed a child labor law through congress, only to have it struck down by the supreme court. Finally in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act came into force. Most Western countries also have movements protesting the importation of goods made with child labor in other countries.
Child "harriers"pushing a coal tub in nineteenth-century London
Another is addiction. In the slums of London in the 1800s, a stereotype of the workingman was that he got his wages on Friday, went to the pub, drank most of them away, and returned home to beat his wife and children. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Acquitted wrongdoers can be penalized, albeit only monetarily, if they are deemed at fault in a civil trial. supreme court opinions have held that people who violate the laws of more than one jurisdiction can be held doubly accountable and tried accordingly. Typically, though, these exceptions have applied only to a relatively small number of individuals.
But when it comes to the financial penalties that accrue from decades of ill-conceived, irresponsible, or corrupt policies, few safeguards will prevent millions of people from being repeatedly whipped by economic misfortune. |
Mark Schapiro
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 During the 2004 election year, Procter & Gamble donated $160,000 to a Chamber campaign for four judges running for state supreme court judgeships in its home state of Ohio, who were promoted by the Republican Party as supporters of "tort reform."28 The American Bar Association later issued a statement criticizing the Chamber for "waging war on the judges who protect the rights and safety of Americans. |
Melody Petersen
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| They give inventors monopolies on products by preventing competitors from selling them for twenty years. The Supreme Court's ruling reversed that of the U.S. Patent Office, which had long held that living things could not be patented. The decision opened the door to the patenting of genes, cell lines, tissues, and organs. Human parts became products. Medicine became a golden business opportunity.
These two changes—the Bayh-Dole Act and the ability to patent biological things—put dollar signs in the eyes of college administrators and their faculties. |
Michele Simon
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| While it's true that the current supreme court has shown a willingness to grant corporations limited free speech protection, you might be wondering, how can this be? How did corporations gain access to a set of rights that were originally intended for individuals? Good question. Unfortunately, I can offer no easy answer. Indeed, many experts question the very idea of so-called legal personhood, a nineteenth-century doctrine that grants corporations constitutional protections otherwise enjoyed only by actual people. |
Greg Critser
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 The council sued the Board of Pharmacy and won at the district court level, and now it fell to Morrison to defend the victory when the board appealed it to the supreme court in 1976.
The core of the federal case, as advanced by the pharmacy board, focused on the issue of commercial speech. Using an older doctrine which held that commercial speech was not protected by the First Amendment, the board argued that the state was well within its constitutional powers to restrict what pharmacists could say. |
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