This post marks our fourth foray into the important case of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which will be argued before the US Supreme Court on 25 March 2014. Anne Tucker, a law professor at Georgia State University, recently explored some of the issues in Hobby Lobby in her thoughtful post More or Less? In particular, we found her distinction between “doing more” and “doing less” to be especially persuasive:

The owners of Hobby Lobby are not asking to do more, rather they are asking to do less. Hobby Lobby wants to provide less than the standards established in the Affordable Care Act, and less than their competitors will be required to provide … This isn’t about the business judgment rule and whether owners, acting through boards of directors, can run companies in line with their view of religious or social or environmental consciousness. This case asks can the religious beliefs of owners of a corporation entitle that corporation to do less under the law and as compared to their competitors …

In other words, it’s one thing if a public or closely-held corporation wants to “do more” by donating some (or even all!) of its revenues to religious or secular causes, but it’s quite another thing when a company wants to “do less” by picking and choosing which laws it doesn’t want to comply with (or by picking and choosing which parts of a given law it doesn’t want to comply with).

But does this distinction always make sense? Consider CVS’s recent decision not to sell any tobacco products in its pharmacies. How would you characterize this much-publicized decision in  “more or less” terms? Is CVS “doing less” by refusing to sell a legal product, or is it “doing more” by giving up such a huge stream of future revenues?