740
Stevens, J., concurring in judgments
difficult challenge to mount successfully, since the challenger must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid." Id., at 745.6 I do not believe the Court has ever actually applied such a strict standard,7 even in Salerno itself, and the Court does not appear to apply Salerno here. Nevertheless, the Court does conceive of respondents' claim as a facial challenge—addressing not the application of the statute to a particular set of plaintiffs before it, but the constitutionality of the statute's categorical prohibition against "aid[ing] another person to attempt suicide." Ante, at 723 (internal quotation marks omitted) (citing Wash. Rev. Code § 9A.36.060(1) (1994)). Accordingly, the Court requires the plaintiffs to show that the interest in liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment "includes a right to commit suicide which itself includes a right to assistance in doing so." Ante, at 723.
History and tradition provide ample support for refusing to recognize an open-ended constitutional right to commit suicide. Much more than the State's paternalistic interest
6 If the Court had actually applied the Salerno standard in this action, it would have taken only a few paragraphs to identify situations in which the Washington statute could be validly enforced. In Salerno itself, the Court would have needed only to look at whether the statute could be constitutionally applied to the arrestees before it; any further analysis would have been superfluous. See Dorf, Facial Challenges to State and Federal Statutes, 46 Stan. L. Rev. 235, 239-240 (1994) (arguing that if the Salerno standard were taken literally, a litigant could not succeed in her facial challenge unless she also succeeded in her as applied challenge).
7 In other cases and in other contexts, we have imposed a significantly lesser burden on the challenger. The most lenient standard that we have applied requires the challenger to establish that the invalid applications of a statute "must not only be real, but substantial as well, judged in relation to the statute's plainly legitimate sweep." Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U. S. 601, 615 (1973). As the Court's opinion demonstrates, Washington's statute prohibiting assisted suicide has a "plainly legitimate sweep." While that demonstration provides a sufficient justification for rejecting respondents' facial challenge, it does not mean that every application of the statute should or will be upheld.
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