New Season….New Episode! We kick-off season #5 with the first episode of a three-part series examining recent legislation restricting abortion in Iowa and its potential impact on public health.

Lauren’s guest is professor Todd Pettys from the University of Iowa College of Law who gives a legal history of abortion rights in the U.S. and Iowa and provides background on the recent court cases and legislation surrounding Iowa’s “Fetal Heartbeat” bill.

Lauren Lavin:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to From the Front Row. I hope that you enjoyed your summer. I know that all of the podcast team did, but we’re really excited to be able to get back to our weekly podcast releases as the new school year begins. We are kicking off the school year with a three-part podcast series on the Heartbeat bill that was passed via special session this summer in Iowa. We know that this can be a sensitive topic, so we wanted to address it from a few angles in an objective manner to bring you high quality information from local experts. This first episode focuses on the legal aspect of this bill and really the legal history of abortion in America. And the next two podcasts will feature public health experts and clinicians.

To begin this series, I’ll be speaking with Todd Pettys, a law professor at the University of Iowa. During this episode, Todd did a fantastic job of providing the legal framework for the abortion conversation in the U.S. today. You’ll learn about the enumerated and unenumerated rights, strict scrutiny, and what the future holds for the Iowa Heartbeat bill.

I’m Lauren Lavin, and if you’re new here, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they’re relevant to anyone, both in and outside of the field of public. Hi, Todd. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on From the Front Row podcast today. I really appreciate having you here. And to start off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do at the University of Iowa, your area of expertise? Just introduce yourself.

Todd Pettys:

Well, I’ve taught here at the University of Iowa for about 25 years now. I’ve taught constitutional… We have two required courses in constitutional law, and I’ve taught one of those throughout that whole 25 year period, and another one for about half of it. I also teach, not every year, but frequently, a Supreme Court seminar where we take nine cases that are pending in front of the real Supreme Court and the students pretend like they’re the justices and they write opinions in those cases, hopefully before the real court actually decides its case. It’s basically a researcher writing class, but this is kind of an irresistible format, I think. So those are the main things that I teach, and I’m grateful, by the way, for your invitation to join you.

Lauren Lavin:

Well, thank you so much. So do you have a specialty area of interest that you do research or work in within law?

Todd Pettys:

Most of my writing is in constitutional law. Most of it has to do with the Federal Constitution. I do have a book published, I don’t know, five years ago on the Iowa Constitution, which kind of tells a little bit about Iowa’s constitutional history and then goes provision by provision about drafting history and what the Iowa Supreme Court has told us about what it means. And I’ve written a little bit about Iowa constitutional law, but mostly, I focus on Federal Constitution and my area of focus has changed over the years from time to time. Right now I’m kind of in a free speech phase of my writing as something I’m asked to talk around campus about and occasionally, off campus. So that’s been my focus, but I move around, try to keep myself interested.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, I think a lot of us can relate to that. Interests change. So as you know, we are talking about the Heartbeat bill today that was passed, well, in 2023, not that long ago, but then also in 2018, we kind of want to get our listeners all on the same page. Like, give us some history or context for abortion regulation really at the national level? That can include something like right to privacy, Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Casey. Anything that you think our listeners need to be on the same page as we continue this conversation.

Todd Pettys:

Okay. Well, I’ll let you prod me with follow up questions. I don’t know how much depth you’re going to want to get into, so I’m going to skate over some stuff that we could talk about at really, great length. Okay. So I’ll give you a short version and you can say, “That’s enough,” or you can ask me some follow-ups. But in the early 1900s and continuing, especially in the 1930s, forties, fifties and sixties, there was a lot of debate on the US Supreme Court about whether, under the Federal Constitution, there are enumerated rights. So either, our right to free speech, our right to free exercise, and those are enumerated because we can read the text and we can see them there. But are there enumerated rights that we have that the courts should vigorously enforce? Okay, there’s some rights we might have that the courts don’t vigorously enforce.

We have the right, but basically, the legislatures just need any plausible reason to override our claim or right and that’s good enough. Or sometimes courts adopt really tough tests and ask very probing questions, and it’s hard for legislation to survive that. So there’s this debate during the first half of the 20th century, which continues today, but that’s really when the debate started in earnest, on the Federal Supreme Court, about whether there are unenumerated rights that the courts should vigorously contest. And in that first half of the 20th century, the main candidate was a right to contract, had to do a lot with labor conditions, minimum wage laws and so forth. So at the Federal level or state level, a legislature passed a minimum wage law. Now, when we pass a minimum wage law, that’s telling employers and employees, the minimum that must be paid. What if there’s an employer that says, “I don’t want to pay that much,” and there’s a worker that says, “I’d be willing to work for less than that”?

A job that pays less is better than no job at all. Well, if I’m the worker and you’re the employer, you and I want to strike our own contract, but the legislature is saying that we cannot. There’s a minimum wage law, it can’t work unless this is the rate of pay. And so, with that right to contract and a lot of things have to do with working conditions, the Supreme Court experimented for a couple of decades with a period where it’s said, “There is a right to contract and we quite vigorously enforce it.” So a lot of minimum wage laws and so forth were struck down.

By the end of the 1950s and end of the 1960s, the Supreme Court decided that that had been a horrible mistake. It was seen as frustrating economic development and the Supreme Court was an obstacle to a lot of worker welfare laws. And so the Supreme Court wrote some opinions and said, “We really overstepped our proper judicial bounds by identifying an unenumerated right and giving it all this protection. That was a mistake. We never should have done it. We’re sorry.” And so they adopt a new law. So we do have a right to contract today, but it gets very minimal protection. Legislature’s just to have some rational reason for the law, and if that’s good, then the courts are going to say, “Fine.”

Sex, and things related to sex, changed that, and it started with contraception when a legislature made it a crime for doctors to, this is the Griswold case, made it a crime for doctors to counsel people about birth control. And the Supreme Court said, “Ah, this is different. These rights about reproductive freedom are different. Here, we’re going to come back and we’re going to start providing vigorous protection.” From that time to the present day, there are then controversies in law about, is that the right approach? Should we just say, as a flat matter, if a right is unenumerated, then you don’t get vigorous protection? Or is it possible that we do have some enumerated rights that are super important that the courts should vigorously protect? And then if so, how do we identify which rights or which? Is the right to contract different from the right to reproductive? What are the tests to identify these rights that get the special protection and how much should they get?

So, now we can talk quickly about abortion and I’ll finish my little mini lecture and you’ll see where you want to go. In Roe versus Wade in the early 1970s, the court said, it ruled seven to two, abortion gets very intense protection under something we call strict scrutiny. Strict scrutiny is a phrase that’s important in the law that says, courts are basically going to very strictly scrutinize a statute that violates a particular right. And so, are free exercise of religion rights. Not always, but under certain circumstances, it gets strict scrutiny. Our free speech rights, sometimes, invasions of those get strict scrutiny. It’s a heavy duty form of scrutiny.

Okay, we go a couple of decades under Roe v. Wade as controversial and in the early 1990s, a plurality of the Supreme Court handed down an opinion that ultimately, a majority of the Supreme Court adopted, and this is Planned Parenthood versus Casey. And the court basically tried to recalibrate the test and said, “We’re talking about an unenumerated, right. Strict scrutiny may be a little too much protection. We do think states have got a pretty strong interest in trying to protect this unborn life. On the other hand, this is important for women, so we’re going to try to recalibrate the judicial test.” And that’s when they adopted something called the undue burden test, which basically says about a pregnancy, we’re going to draw a line in a pregnancy. And that line is viability point at which this fetus could live, perhaps with medical intervention, perhaps not, but the fetus could live outside the person’s body, the woman’s body. Prior to viability, the Supreme Court says, beginning in Casey, “State cannot impose an undue burden on the person who wants to terminate a pregnancy.” Okay?

So some obstacles are okay, some burdens are okay, but not undue ones. Okay? After viability, the state can ban abortion altogether except for the life or possibly, health of the pregnant individual. All right. The last little piece here at the Federal story then is the Dobbs case. Last year in Dobbs, the Supreme Court said that Roe versus Wade, Planned for versus Casey, are all a mistake and basically aligned the abortion with, what I described as, the right to contract. And the Dobbs opinion is basically, functionally, the same thing as the opinions that the Supreme Court started handing down in the 1950s and sixties and forties too, where they said, “This whole right to contract experiment where we were vigorously enforcing this unenumerated right, that was a mistake. And so, in the contract realm, the court gave legislatures much, much greater freedom. Dobbs did exactly the same thing with respect to abortion rights. That’s a lot [inaudible] subject so.

Lauren Lavin:

No, I have never heard it explained, one, so succinctly, but also, in depth. I had not heard about this unenumerated versus enumerated. And just to clarify for our listeners, enumerated means that it’s not specifically listed and it’s more reading between the lines.

Todd Pettys:

Exactly. Right. That’s exactly right. So when we talk about contraception and when we talk about abortion, the right to quote “privacy”, is kind of the umbrella there. But when we go read the Constitution, the Federal Constitution and the state one as well for that matter, we don’t see the right to privacy there.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Todd Pettys:

We do see a right to speech, we do see a right to free exercise of religion, a right to trial by jury, a right not to be cruelly and unusually punished. There’s quite a few very important rights that are spelled out. But then the question is, are there more that we have? And so, if you think about it, and it can be easy to say, “Well, if it’s not enumerated in the Constitution, then basically, it doesn’t get any protection.”

Now we start thinking, okay, now what if? What if the government were to say, you cannot have more than one child. You don’t have a right to have more than one child. Would we say, “Well, it’s not enumerated in the Constitution that I can have more than one child. So, what? The government can tell me one, and that’s it?” Contraception, we make it a crime for people to use contraception. If we make it a crime to use contraception, that means condom wrappers and the like, are evidence of a crime. It’s contraband, like marijuana stuff or the little lighter and the spoons or in crack cocaine or whatever. Well, there’s a condom wrapper. A crime was committed here, and so we’re going to get a search warrant. We’ve heard, we’ve got good reliable evidence to think that in your home, you’ve been using condoms, and so we get a search warrant, we can come and we can look for your garbage cans looking for used condoms or condom wrappers or something. It’s not enumerated in the Constitution. Does our system permit that? That’s the realm in which we’re dealing here.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay, so I would say that I bet a lot of people are thinking because it’s abortion and contraception has become such a political issue that I think it was just given, that it would be more specifically laid out. So I think it’s really interesting to learn that it all umbrellas under something like right to privacy. So we’re really in the weeds when we’re talking about these specifics.

Todd Pettys:

Yeah. No, that’s right. And I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s room for good faith disagreement on these issues, and it’s not easy to say, textually, it’s not easy to say. It’s not obvious. The place where the right to privacy has been deemed located, is in the due process clause. If the courts are going to strongly enforce your right, they have to anchor it to the constitutional text or structure somewhere and they’ve chosen the due process clause and that’s not a natural fit.

When you go read the due process clause, what it says is, the government cannot deny you life, liberty, or property without due process of law. In other words, if we do give you due process of law, then we can take away your life, liberty or property. We can execute you. If we want it to be a capital punishment, we can take away your life, but we have to give you due process of law. We have to give you a trial first. It’s in that text that the right to privacy has been located. And so that’s why I say there’s room for good faith disagreement.

Lauren Lavin:

I appreciate that context. I just think I have one more question on this and then we can move on from the history portion of that. So obviously, there’s been a lot of change in the court’s opinions regarding this over the last 50 years. What do you think drives that change or what can we attribute that to, especially in the recent years?

Todd Pettys:

There’s no question that politics has an influence. It has an influence in terms of the election of our president and the Senate where justices are confirmed. It has to do, in the state of Iowa, with the election of the governor because the governor ultimately chooses. We have a nominating commission and so forth but at the end of the day, the governor decides, choosing from a slate that’s given to her, who’s going to be [inaudible]. So, no question about that. The fact that I tell you about the right to contract once upon a time, and we don’t know that in our culture and we don’t know about that history often in our culture, culture because there’s not a continuing fight about it. Even with respect to contraception, we don’t find on the court some push there, but because culturally, we’re not fighting about contraception, but on the pro-life side, they have maintained there’s been a sustained push year after year, decade after decade. So that clearly has a role.

I think courts experience, once they adopt the test and then they’re asked to decide a whole bunch of other cases under that test, that kind of judicial experience sometimes can inform whether the test was a good idea in the first place. So if we adopt something like an undue burden test, those words are easy enough to say, but now we start getting a whole bunch of hypotheticals. What about this? Is this an undue burden? Is that an undue burden? And so we have to see how that test goes, and we might decide that it’s a great test and it’s working just fine. Or we might decide, you know what? There’s all kinds of ambiguities in this, and now we think, we worry that judges are deciding these cases just based on their own personal preferences. The test is not actually constraining their discretion, kind of dictating the outcomes. Judges are just basically doing what they want. So that might cause us to want to back away from a test. Things like that, I think.

Changes in constitutional interpretation. We talk a lot more about originalism these days and about the text than we once did. And so as constitutional theories of interpretation rise up, we start to pay more attention perhaps to their implications. So it’s a lot of different forces. I wouldn’t say it’s all one thing. It’s kind of a tangle of things.

Lauren Lavin:

More like the perfect storm, and this is where we ended that.

Todd Pettys:

That’s right.

Lauren Lavin:

So when we look at abortion, we’ve kind of just been talking about it from the Federal level. Can you give some insight into state versus Federal for these particular laws, in general?

Todd Pettys:

Yeah, so we all have constitutional rights under two different constitutions, no matter what state we live in. I’ll say Iowa, but I’m sure there’s people who listen to your podcast who are elsewhere. Whatever state you live in, there is a state constitution there which guarantees you certain rights. And of course, wherever you are in the United States, the Federal Constitution is giving you certain rights. Those are two different ticks, two different drafting histories, ratified at different moments in time. So they’re separate. Often they’re interpreted in tandem. It’s very common for state supreme courts, when there is a clause to be interpreted that is the same as a clause we would find in the Federal Constitution. State courts very frequently will look to the Federal Constitution for guidance, and often we’ll just kind of adopt wholesale, whatever the interpretation is happening at the Feds level, that’s what we’re going to do at the state level.

But there’s nothing that says that we have to do that, okay. And I’ll give you same-sex marriage as an example. Iowa in 2009, I think it was in the Varner v Brean case, said that under the Iowa Constitution, there’s a right to same-sex marriage. At that point in time, the United States Supreme Court had not said that, but because that was an interpretation of the Iowa Constitution, what the Iowa Supreme Court said in that case, that was the end of it. We didn’t wait to see a US Supreme Court was going to overturn it ’cause it’s not up to the US Supreme Court to tell us what the Iowa Constitution means. That’s up to the Iowa Supreme Court. And so at the state level, especially once it started to become clear that the chances for overruling Roe and Casey were increasing because of changes in personnel and so forth on the Federal Supreme Court, when you start to contemplate that the Federal right to abortion might disappear or be greatly diminished, that starts focusing a lot of attention on, well, what about the state constitution?

Is it possible that here at the state level, we’re going to get protection that we might lose at the Federal level? But that’s okay because here at the state level, we’ve got it. All right. In 2018, 2018 was a very important year in Iowa abortion politics. In the year 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court, for the first time, looked at this question, what does the Iowa Constitution say about the right to abortion? And what the Iowa Supreme Court said, interpreting the due process clause of the Iowa Constitution, I said, as the due process clause that textually, is thought to do this work. The Iowa Supreme Court in 2018, looked at the Iowa due process clause and said, “Strict scrutiny is the appropriate standard.” Basically, the standard that Roe versus Wade had originally adopted, the undue burden tests, the slightly watered down, a little more accommodating for restrictive legislation that we’d seen at the Federal level.

The Iowa Supreme Court rejected that said, “Nope, that’s not enough protection.” In Iowa, there is very vigorous protection that happened in 2018. In 2018, that’s the same year where we first saw fetal heartbeat law pass by the legislature. And so in 2018, we see two different institutions of the Iowa State government going in very opposite directions. That’s the year where the Iowa Supreme Court says, abortion rights get a very high level of protection. At the same time, the legislature is saying, “Boy, right around that six week mark, when we think we can hear a steady thing that we would call a heartbeat, after that, with narrow exceptions, we shouldn’t allow abortion.”

So when the legislature passed that, we’ll call the Fetal heartbeat law, in 2018, there was a lawsuit. Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit and said, they just passed this fetal heartbeat law here in 2018 in Iowa, and it’s unconstitutional. There’s no way it’s going to pass strict scrutiny, which the Iowa Supreme Court has just adopted. And they’re absolutely right about that. I mean, if that’s the test, if strict scrutiny is the appropriate test, then that law is flatly unconstitutional. There’s no argument around it if strict scrutiny is the test. And so, the trial level court, in that case, permanently enjoined, that is, they issued an injunction that said, this fetal heartbeat law is unenforceable. Because it violates what the Iowa Supreme Court has just told us is the status of abortion rights here in Iowa. And the state did not file an appeal. The state basically conceded defeat. They didn’t go back up to the Iowa Supreme Court and ask the court to change its mind about the appropriate standard. They basically accepted that defeat.

Lauren Lavin:

That was great context. I wanted to know about the 2018. So what started the Iowa Supreme Court strict scrutiny decision if it wasn’t in response to that original bill, why did they make that decision before that bill was passed?

Todd Pettys:

Yeah, okay. Well, the next thing the Iowa legislature did a few years later was, they passed a 24 hour waiting period, which says to the pregnant individual, no matter what stage of pregnancy we… It’s not like a six week mark or something, it could be anywhere in those first few months. You come in, you say, “I want to terminate this pregnancy.” The 24 hour waiting period says, “Well, we’re going to confirm that you’re pregnant. We’re going to provide you with certain information, and now you have to go away for at least 24 hours and if you still want to do it, then come back and we’ll do the procedure then.” But can’t just, it’s not one stop shopping where you come in for appointment number one and do the procedure that same day. You’re going to have to have at least two. Okay?

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Todd Pettys:

Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit about that, and in 2022, just last year, the Iowa Supreme Court said that it’s 2018 ruling, basically, the Roe versus Wade of Iowa politics and law. Okay? In 2022, the Iowa Supreme Court, which now had different composition, we had some justices leave and some new justices appointed by our governor, that court said, “The 2018 ruling was a mistake but we’re not going to announce today what the standard is. The state hasn’t argued for some particular standard. So we’re just going to assume, for the time being, that the test is undue burden. We’re getting rid of strict scrutiny, so we’re going to fall down to this undue burden standard. And so for the time being, that’s the appropriate test, but we’ll tell you later what the real test is kind of permanently, but right now, everyone should assume it’s undue burden.”

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. So that’s what happened-

Todd Pettys:

Yeah, and let me just say, exactly, and one week later, is when we got Dobbs at the Federal level.

Lauren Lavin:

Oh, wow. Okay.

Todd Pettys:

So one week after the Iowa Supreme Court says 2018 was wrong at the Federal level, interpreting the Federal Constitution, Dobbs comes down where the Supreme Court rules this whole Roe versus Wade Planned Parent versus Casey judicial experiment was a mistake. It’s just, as long as the law is rational, then it is valid.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay.

Todd Pettys:

So now we’ve had, beginning last year, as of last summer here in Iowa, we would say, there’s no Federal constitutional right to abortion. But under the Iowa Constitution, we do get undue burden protection.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay. So that’s where Governor Reynolds had the opportunity then to reintroduce or something similar to the 2018 bill. And she did that via special session, is my understanding.

Todd Pettys:

Yes. Right. Because what had happened was that 2018 legislation about the Fetal Heartbeat bill, the original one, that was passed, what, five years ago. The first thing the governor did was ask the Iowa Supreme Court to revive that law to basically, reopen that 2018 litigation, get rid of the injunction that was barring that statute from being enforced, and basically say that we now have a fetal heartbeat law. And the Iowa Supreme Court divided earlier this year, three to three, we have seven justices on the Iowa Supreme Court, one of them recused herself. So we’re down to six, and we had basically, a tie and the court split three to three on whether to revive that 2018 law. Three of the court’s more conservative members thought that we should and basically just adopted the Dobbs standard, this test of mere rationality and that’s all the protection that you get. Three justices thought, this isn’t the right vehicle for announcing such an important change in the law and we’re not going to revive this case.

The governor had 30 days to appeal that ruling in 2018, or the State had 30 days, they didn’t appeal. And so if the legislature wants a Fetal Heartbeat law, they’re going to have to pass it again. And Governor Reynolds said, “You got it.” She called a special session. The legislature came in, they repassed the Fetal Heartbeat law, tried to-

Lauren Lavin:

Can you explain what a special session is?

Todd Pettys:

Special session is, we have them at the Federal level and at the state level, and both constitutions, the Federal one, and the Iowa one, say to the governor, that if the legislature is not currently in session, all the legislators have gone home, but we need them right now, we need a law. There’s kind of an emergency or something really important going on, the governor can call everyone back. Just like the President of the United States can, the Federal level of Congress has adjourned for the summer, and they’re off enjoying their vacations, and suddenly President Biden says, we need legislation now on a particular subject. You can tell the legislators, the members of the House and Senate, you’re all coming back. The governor can do the same thing. And so even though the Iowa legislature had adjourned for the year, she called them back and said, “We’re going to see you in Des Moines here this summer. I’d like you to think about passing the Fetal Heartbeat law.” So the legislators came back and they passed it.

A lawsuit of, and this will be the end of the litigation story. Right away, planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit to enjoin, that is, to make unenforceable, this new second, the 2023 Fetal Heartbeat law, and the trial level court issued that injunction. Which is not surprising at all, because the trial level court has to follow the instructions that the Iowa Supreme Court has given. And you’ll remember, I know this is confusing, last year, 2022, the Iowa Supreme Court had said, “It’s not strict scrutiny, but we’re not deciding for every day what the standard is. Everyone should assume it’s undue burden.” And again, the undue burden test says, any point prior to viability, the state cannot put a substantial obstacle in the path of the person who wants to terminate the pregnancy. And so the trial level court said, my boss, basically, my bosses, have told me to apply the undue burden test. If we’re telling a woman at six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks, 10, et cetera, that you cannot terminate pregnancy, even though it’s not viable yet, you can’t terminate it because we’re detecting cardiac activity, that is an undue burden.

So the trial court followed the instructions that the Iowa Supreme Court had given, issued that injunction, and now we will have an appeal of that to the Iowa Supreme Court, and that ruling will tell us whether we’re going to keep undue burden at Iowa, that’s a possibility, or go the route of Dobbs at the Federal level and say, “States can do basically whatever they want as long as there’s some rational, plausible justification,” or something else. I won’t say the last chapter because it’s hard to imagine this debate ever going away in this country, but for the time being, that’s the last chapter waiting to be written.

Lauren Lavin:

Okay, so that’s where it leaves us today. We’re waiting for an appeal from the Supreme Court where they’ll decide-

Todd Pettys:

That’s right, Lauren.

Lauren Lavin:

… The final law. What possible scenarios do you think could play out or how does that work with the three versus three tie with the one recusal?

Todd Pettys:

Well, we know that there are three justices. So again, there’s a total of seven. So you need four for a majority. We know that there are three who want to get rid of the undue burden test and align the Iowa Constitution with how the Federal Supreme Court now reads the Federal Constitution, which is to say, there’s basically no abortion right at all. There’s three, so we just need one more. Justice Dana Oxley is the one who had recused herself. If she participates in this next litigation, and if she agrees with those three, then that gives us four, and that will be our new rule. If she doesn’t agree with them, then we care a lot about what she thinks and what those other three thought. And it’s hard to know for sure, what those other three, the three who said, we’re not going to reinstate the 2018 Fetal Heartbeat law. It’s hard to know for sure what they think. It’s possible that they feel undue burden is the right standard.

But there were also a lot of procedural oddities in that case that gave them room to say, there had been a lawsuit back in 2018. The district court, the trial court issued its ruling and the state never appealed. So that case, we’ve basically wrapped up that case, put a bow on it and set it on the shelf, and it’s now too late, procedurally under our rules, to come back and bring it back and redecide it. So we think you should, if the legislature wants it, they should pass it again. So it’s possible that those three are committed to undue burden. It’s also totally possible that they’re not. And the question is going to be, whether at least one of those three or Justice Oxley, the one who recused herself, will any one of those four justices join the other? And that is how, ultimately, the status of abortion law, for the time being, in Iowa is going to be determined.

Lauren Lavin:

When can we expect that to take place?

Todd Pettys:

Sometime between, I’ll say, now, but it’s not going to happen this week. Arguments are going to have to happen in front of the Iowa Supreme Court and so forth. When the trial level court issued its injunction, it was a preliminary injunction or a temporary arrangement, pending a trial. And so as a procedural matter, there’s different things that may happen. The governor, the state, has gone to the Iowa Supreme Court and said, you should take this case now and decide this now. If the Iowa Supreme Court accepts that interpretation, then sometime between this fall and the end of next June, they’ll issue their ruling. They try to wrap up their work just like the Federal Supreme Court does by July 1st. So if the Iowa Supreme Court keeps the case, we’ll know sometime between now and the end of next June. So basically, sometime in the next year.

If at any point, the Ohio Supreme Court says, “You know what? Let’s let this continue to play out procedurally at the trial level.” We haven’t had a final ruling yet from the trial court. We’ve had this preliminary ruling. I think we all know what they’re going to say, which is what the governor is telling the Supreme Court. We know what the trial level court’s going to say, why bother to give them the chance? You guys should just take the case now and decide it. But it’s possible the Iowa Supreme Court would say let’s give the trial court a chance to at least write an opinion fully resolving the case, and then they can appeal. And if that happens, it could be a couple of years before we get a ruling because the trial proceedings have to play out and then an appeal up to the Iowa Supreme Court. So for those who really want a final answer to this question, I would say you’re going to get one almost for sure, within the next two years. It might be sooner than that.

Lauren Lavin:

So with that, I’d like to thank Todd for being on the show today.

Todd Pettys:

Thanks so much, Lauren, for the conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thank you to Todd for joining us today. This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.