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Ordered Liberty After Dobbs, Linda C. Mcclain, James E. Fleming
Ordered Liberty After Dobbs, Linda C. Mcclain, James E. Fleming
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay explores the implications of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization for the future of substantive due process (SDP) liberties protecting personal autonomy, bodily integrity, familial relationships (including marriage), sexuality, and reproduction. We situate Dobbs in the context of prior battles on the Supreme Court over the proper interpretive approach to deciding what basic liberties the Due Process Clause (DPC) protects. As a framing device, we refer to two competing approaches as “the party of [Justice] Harlan or Casey” versus “the party of Glucksberg.” In Dobbs, the dissent co-authored by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan represents the party of …
Supreme Court Precedent And The Politics Of Repudiation, Robert L. Tsai
Supreme Court Precedent And The Politics Of Repudiation, Robert L. Tsai
Faculty Scholarship
This is an invited essay that will appear in a book titled "Law's Infamy," edited by Austin Sarat as part of the Amherst Series on Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. Every legal order that aspires to be called just is held together by not only principles of justice but also archetypes of morally reprehensible outcomes, and villains as well as heroes. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who believed himself to be a hero solving the great moral question of slavery in the Dred Scott case, is today detested for trying to impose a racist, slaveholding vision of the Constitution upon America. …
Capturing The Judiciary: Carhart And The Undue Burden Standard, Khiara Bridges
Capturing The Judiciary: Carhart And The Undue Burden Standard, Khiara Bridges
Faculty Scholarship
In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Supreme Court replaced the trimester framework, first articulated nineteen years earlier in Roe v. Wade, with a new test for determining the constitutionality of abortion regulations — the “undue burden standard.” The Court’s 2007 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart was its most recent occasion to use the undue burden standard, as the Court was called upon to ascertain the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, a federal statute proscribing certain methods of performing second- and third-trimester abortions. A majority of the Court held that the regulation was constitutionally permissible, finding …
The New Constitutional Order And The Heartening Of Conservative Constitutional Aspirations, James E. Fleming
The New Constitutional Order And The Heartening Of Conservative Constitutional Aspirations, James E. Fleming
Faculty Scholarship
The basic question for this conference is whether we as a people have entered, or are on the verge of entering, a new constitutional order. In 2003, Mark Tushnet published a terrific book, The New Constitutional Order, an expansion of his insightful Foreword: The New Constitutional Order and the Chastening of Constitutional Ambition in the Harvard Law Review.2 The title of that book was an inspiration for the title of this conference. And the title of that article is the basis for the title of my article. For years, liberals and progressives have been anticipating or announcing a conservative revolution …
The Supreme Court's Narrow View On Civil Rights, Jack M. Beermann
The Supreme Court's Narrow View On Civil Rights, Jack M. Beermann
Faculty Scholarship
The right to choose abortion, although recently significantly curtailed from its original scope,' is a federally protected liberty interest of women, and is at least protected against the imposition of "undue burdens" by state and local government.2 Some of the most serious threats to women's ability to choose abortion have come not from government regulation, but from private, national, organized efforts to prevent abortions. In addition to seeking change through the political system, some of these organizations, most notably Operation Rescue, have focused on the providers of abortion, and have attempted to prevent abortions by forcibly closing abortion clinics …
The Supreme Court, Liberty, And Abortion, George J. Annas
The Supreme Court, Liberty, And Abortion, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Abortion has aroused intense personal and political passions for almost two decades in the United States, and demeaning sloganeering has long substituted for reasoned discourse. Just as few people have actually read the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, few people who have expressed their opinion on the Supreme Court's ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, which has been condemned by activists on both sides of the debate about abortion rights, have read it. In one poll, however, more than 70 percent of Americans agreed with the restrictions upheld by the Court as they understood …