Written by Marshall Amaya and Minji Kang

Letter From The Editors-In-Chief:

Trojan Review proudly presents our first issue of Volume 2, a symposium-themed collection of notes centered on Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, and Substantive Due Process. We selected this theme track after careful consideration and with direct intention: we wanted to select a theme that illuminates some of the most pressing questions that contemporary legal scholars and attorneys currently face. Following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a litany of questions become unmoored—how, if at all, does the ideological mixture of the Court affect the stability of previous precedents? If so, which precedents? These questions piqued our curiosity and compelled us to explore where those questions led. Our authors received this theme in stride and with impeccable pace…

Written by Victor Zhang

Scattered throughout the Dobbs majority opinion, the Supreme Court’s most recent evaluation of substantive due process case, is a 1905 decision, Lochner v. New York, which In Lochner, the Court declared unconstitutional a state statute that placed a cap on the weekly working hours of bakers. The majority rooted its reasoning under an implicit right to freely negotiate contracts protected by the Due Process Clause, and invalidated the law …

Written by Qurui Jiang

The Supreme Court of the United States has moved towards prohibiting some extreme sentences for juvenile offenders under the Eighth Amendment. This progressive trend, however…

Written by Tina Hoang

The right to privacy first appeared in the decision of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Almost a decade later, Griswold became the precedent for the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), establishing the right to abortion. Roe has provided protection against state laws prohibiting abortions and guaranteed individuals access to safe and legal abortions nationwide …

Written by Chynna Hinrichsen

The Framers of the Constitution derived the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause from the Magna Carta’s “law of the land” provision, which guaranteed English liberties.1 Conversely, substantive due process, a considerable part of what the Due Process Clause is now, is not rooted in the text and history of the Due Process Clause…

Written by Marco DeBellis

Autonomy, while lacking a consistent definition in the legal literature, and seldom scribed into positive law, appears to be central to the debate of abortion and other medical practices. The term is commonly understood as “the quality or state of being self-governing.” But a philosophical reading warrants …