Preface.

• Author: Bopp, James, Jr.

The first article in this edition is a critical examination of the states' rights arguments that have been employed in the Oregon v. Ashcroft litigation to challenge Attorney General John Ashcroft's interpretation of the federal Controlled Substances Act. Marc Spindelman, assistant professor of law at Ohio State University, criticizes those arguments as reflecting bad politics--politics of complicity--that self-styled liberals should resist and reject.

In the second article, Bradford William Short, historian, philosopher, and law student, challenges bioethical reinterpretations of philosophy and history. In recent years, several bioethicists have made extraordinary claims that some of Europe's most prominent early modern moral philosophers never believed in an inalienable right to life. This claim is quite controversial because this right is an important basis for secular moral opposition to assisted suicide. Irrespective of whether opposition to assisted suicide is philosophically justified, these early modern philosophers that the bioethicists write about did in fact believe in the inalienable right to life, as is amply demonstrated here. Short concludes that bioethicists can only come to their conclusions concerning these philosophers by employing an illegitimate historical method.

The Verbatim section is the New Jersey appellate decision in the case of Acuna v. Turkish reversing the...