May it please the court?

In separate rulings last week, courts ruled against a waiting period for women seeking abortions and a law meant to keep doctors from asking patients if they have any firearms lying around the house.

The Florida Supreme Court blocked the abortion law, a 2015 measure that would have required women to wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure. Thursday’s 4-2 decision was the second time the state high court kept the law from taking effect.

In the majority opinion, Justice Barbara Pariente wrote that enactment of the law “would lead to irreparable harm.”

“Indeed, under Florida’s pre-existing informed consent law, a woman can already take all of the time she needs to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy, both before she arrives at the clinic and after she receives the counseling information,” she wrote for the majority. “No other medical procedure, even those with greater health consequences, requires a twenty-four hour waiting period in the informed consent process.”

But, in a dissent joined by Justice Ricky Polston, Justice Charles Canady accused the majority of taking “an unreasonably narrow view of the purpose of informed consent” and argued that the plaintiffs had not presented any evidence to prove that the 24-hour waiting period imposed “a significant restriction on the right to abortion.”

Hours later, a federal appeals court found unconstitutional major portions of a controversial Florida law restricting physicians and other health-care providers from asking patients about guns.

The statute, dubbed the “docs vs. glocks” law, sought to prevent physicians from entering information about gun ownership into medical records if the physicians know the information is not “relevant” to patients’ medical care or safety or to the safety of other people.

Also, the 2011 law said doctors should refrain from asking about gun ownership by patients or family members unless the doctors believe in “good faith” that the information is relevant to medical care or safety. And the law sought to prevent doctors from discriminating against patients or “harassing” them because of owning firearms.

In its ruling Thursday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the record-keeping, inquiry and anti-harassment provisions of the law are unconstitutional, but upheld the portion of the law that bars doctors from discriminating against patients who have guns.