Today is the anniversary of the Supreme Court Decision in 1905 that upheld the right of states to impose compulsory vaccinations. The decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state. Jacobson has been invoked in numerous other Supreme Court cases as an example of a baseline exercise of the police power.
Massachusetts was one of 11 states that had compulsory vaccination laws. Massachusetts law empowered the board of health of individual cities and towns to enforce mandatory, free vaccinations for adults over the age of 21 if the municipality determined it was necessary for the public health or safety of the community. Adults who refused were subject to a $5 fine (about $186 in 2025 dollars).
Cambridge pastor Henning Jacobson had lived through an era of mandatory vaccinations back in his original home of Sweden. Jacobson refused vaccination saying that “he and his son had had bad reactions to earlier vaccinations”. Because of his refusal to get vaccinated, Jacobson was prosecuted and fined $5. Over the next three years until his case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, Jacobson argued that subjecting him to a fine or imprisonment for neglecting or refusing vaccination was an invasion of his liberty, the law was “unreasonable, arbitrary and oppressive”, and that one should not be subjected to the law if he or she objects to vaccination, no matter the reason.
Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the decision for a 7–2 majority that the Massachusetts law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand” and that “[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.“[2]
Furthermore, the Court held that mandatory vaccinations are neither arbitrary nor oppressive so long as they do not “go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public“.
Justice John Marshall Harlan, Supreme Court
Why the power went out…
THE WINNER!
Today is the birthday, in 1946,of J Geils, American guitarist, with The J. Geils Band who had the 1982 US No.1 & UK No.3 single ‘Centerfold’, which was taken from their US No.1 1981 album Freeze Frame. On April 11, 2017, Groton Police conducted a well-being check on Geils and found him unresponsive at his home. He was pronounced dead from natural causes at age 71. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqDjMZKf-wg
