WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2011/Christian Newswire --
Today, on behalf of the adult stem researchers it represents, the Jubilee Campaign's Law of Life Project and their co-counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, filed their Notice of Appeal asking the United States Court of Appeals to reinstate their case dismissed by United States District Court for the District of Columbia in its July 27 decision based upon the district court's interpretation of the Court of Appeal's April 29 ruling vacating the district court's August 23, 2010 preliminary injunction of the National Institute of Health's regulations that Obama administration promulgated to permit the federal funding of "research in which" human embryos are "knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."
While again affirming the standing of adult stem cell researchers to challenge these regulations, the federal district court dismissed the case saying that it had no choice under the "mandate rule" but to follow the Court of Appeal's April 29 ruling that Congress' ban on human embryonic research was written in a sufficiently "ambiguous" fashion to ban the use of federal funds that risked the "injury or death" of human embryos, but not the use of federal funds to do research on the embryonic stem cells that were derived from such injury or destruction. In the words of U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth explaining his July 27 decision:
While it may be true that by following the Court of Appeals' conclusion as to the ambiguity of 'research', the Court has become a grudging partner in a bout of 'linguistic jujitsu', Sherley, 2011 WL 1599685, at 22 (Henderson, J. dissenting), such is life for an antepenultimate court.
