CWSL Professor Nancy Marcus Published on Privacy Rights in Dobbs Aftermath

SAN DIEGO (May 6, 2024) -- California Western School of Law (CWSL) Associate Professor of Law Nancy Marcus’s article, “Reclaiming Personal Privacy Rights Through the Freedom of Intimate Association,” was published last week by Seton Hall Law Review. In the article, Professor Marcus takes on the challenge of identifying “alternative potential constitutional sources of protection for personal privacy and relationships” in a post-Dobbs world. 

Professor Marcus notes in the article that since the Dobbs decision, scholars have sought new ground for “the right to personal privacy, long understood to be protected under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ Due Process Clauses” and that the “evisceration of modern substantive due process in the context of abortion rights implicates and endangers LGBTQ+ rights and other personal privacy rights as well.” 

Reviving the “the long-neglected freedom of intimate association doctrine,” grounded in the First Amendment and in Roberts v. United States Jaycees, Professor Marcus ultimately argues for “a repositioning of tradition along with a reclaiming of intimacy itself to pave the path for future cases in which LGBTQ+ people and others may successfully claim the strong constitutional protections to which they are entitled for their personal relationships.”

Click here to read Professor Marcus's article.