Law Commons^™

Decoding Dobbs: A Typology To Better Understand The Roberts Court's Jurisprudence, Katie Yoder

Honors Projects

The U.S. Supreme Court first recognized Substantive Due Process (“SDP”) in the early twentieth century. In Lochner v. New York, the Court established that there are certain unenumerated rights that are implied by the Fourteenth Amendment.Though SDP originated in a case about worker’s rights and liberties, it quickly became relevant to many cases surrounding personal intimate decisions involving health, safety, marriage, sexual activity, and reproduction.Over the past 60 years, the Court relied upon SDP to justify expanding a fundamental right to privacy, liberty, and the right to medical decision making. Specifically, the court applied these concepts to allow for freedoms …

Charging Abortion, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

As long as Roe v. Wade remained good law, prosecutors could largely avoid the question of abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has now placed prosecutors at the forefront of the abortion wars. Some chief prosecutors in antiabortion states have pledged to not enforce antiabortion laws, whereas others are targeting even out-of-state providers. This post-Dobbs reality, wherein the ability to obtain an abortion depends not only on the politics of one’s state but also the policies of one’s local district attorney, has received minimal scrutiny from legal scholars.

Prosecutors have broad charging discretion, …

Full Faith And Credit In The Post-Roe Era, Celia P. Janes

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, once again leaving the question of whether abortion should be legal to individual state legislatures. This decision allowed the Texas law known as S.B. 8, alternatively known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, to go into effect. The law allows private individuals to sue anyone who has performed or has aided and abetted the performance or inducement of an abortion in Texas. California responded to this law with Assembly Bill 2091, which prevents California state courts from issuing subpoenas arising under S.B. 8 and similar laws in other states. This Note addresses …

An Exegesis Of The Meaning Of Dobbs: Despotism, Servitude, & Forced Birth, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The Dobbs decision has been leaked. Gathered outside of New York City's St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, pro-choice protesters chant: "Not the church, not the state, the people must decide their fate."

A white man wearing a New York Fire Department sweatshirt and standing on the front steps responds: "l am the people, l am the people, l am the people, the people have decided, the court has decided, you lose . . . . You have no choice. Not your body, not your choice, your body is mine and you're having my baby."

Despicable but not unexpected,³ this man's comments …

Brief Of Amici Curiae In Support Of The United States: Moyle & Idaho V. United States, David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, Rachel Rebouché

Amici Briefs

This amicus brief, submitted to the Supreme Court in Moyle v. United States, argues that Moyle, and the impending circuit split surrounding it, is a symptom of a larger workability problem with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization framework. Dobbs is already proving, in its brief existence, to be unworkable, and must be overturned. In short order, the Dobbs ruling has ushered in an era of unprecedented legal and doctrinal chaos, precipitating a fury of disorienting legal battles across the country. The Dobbs framework has created destabilizing conflicts between federal and state authorities, as in the current …

Child Sacrifices: The Precarity Of Minors’ Autonomy And Bodily Integrity After Dobbs, Teri Dobbins Baxter

Scholarly Works

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court held that there is no constitutional right to abortion. The decision has had a devastating impact on people seeking abortions in many states, and it will have an even more profound effect on the rights and lives of minors. Pregnant minors face greater risks than pregnant adults when they are forced to continue a pregnancy that can harm their physical and mental health and their educational and financial futures. Very young minors are incapable of consenting to the sexual acts that result in pregnancy, but many states require even these …

Originalism After Dobbs, Bruen, And Kennedy: The Role Of History And Tradition, Randy E. Barnett, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In three recent cases, the constitutional concepts of history and tradition have played important roles in the reasoning of the Supreme Court. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization relied on history and tradition to overrule Roe v. Wade. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen articulated a history and tradition test for the validity of laws regulating the right to bear arms recognized by the Second Amendment. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District looked to history and tradition in formulating the test for the consistency of state action with the Establishment Clause.

These cases raise important questions about …

The Impact Of Us Abortion Policy On Rheumatology Clinical Practice: A Cross-Sectional Survey Of Rheumatologists, Bonnie L. Bermas, Irene Blanco, Rosalind Ramsey-Goldman, Ashira D. Blazer, Megan E.B. Clowse, Cuoghi Edens, Greer Donley, Leslie Pierce, Catherine Wright, Mehret Birru Talabi

Articles

In June of 2022, the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health overturned Roe v Wade, finding that there was no federal constitutional right to abortion. Subsequently, almost one third of states have near-total abortion bans in effect. Our team distributed a confidential web-based survey to a sample of US-based rheumatologists to assess how the Dobbs decision is affecting the clinical care of reproductive-age females with rheumatic diseases (RMDs), including teratogen prescribing, pregnancy termination referrals, and rheumatologists’ perceived vulnerability to criminalization.

Pro-Choice Plans, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Constitution may no longer protect abortion, but a surprising federal statute does. That statute is called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”), and it has long been one of the most powerful preemptive statutes in the entire United States Code. ERISA regulates “employee benefit plans,” which are the vehicle by which approximately 155 million people receive their health insurance. Plans are thus a major private payer for health benefits—and therefore abortions. While many post-Dobbs anti-abortion laws directly bar abortion by making either the receipt or provision of …

Privacy: Pre- And Post-Dobbs, Rona Kaufman

Law Faculty Publications

The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to include a fundamental right to familial privacy. The exact contours of that right were developed by the Court from 1923 until 2015. In 2022, with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court abruptly changed course and held that the right to terminate a pregnancy is no longer part of the right to privacy previously recognized by the Court. This essay seeks to place Dobbs in the context of the Court’s family privacy cases in an effort to understand the Court’s …

Policing Pregnancy "Crimes", Valena Beety, Jennifer Oliva

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that there is no right to abortion healthcare under the United States Constitution. This Essay details how states prosecuted pregnant people for pregnancy behaviors and speculative fetal harms prior to the Dobbs decision. In this connection, it also identifies two, related post-Dobbs concerns: (1) that states will ramp up their policing of pregnancy behaviors and (2) that prosecutors will attempt to substantiate these charges by relying on invalid scientific evidence. This Essay examines the faulty forensic science that states have used to support fetal harm allegations and reminds …

Thinly Rooted: Dobbs, Tradition, And Reproductive Justice, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. These two cases held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed a right of women to terminate a pregnancy. Roe reflected over 60 years of substantive due process precedent finding and reaffirming a constitutional right of privacy with several animating themes, including bodily integrity, equality, and dignity. The Court’s substantive due process doctrine had established that the analysis in such cases would involve multiple points of inquiry, such as tradition, contemporary practices, and …

Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.

In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional …

Freedom Not To See A Doctor: The Path Toward Over-The-Counter Abortion Pills, Lewis Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

American courts and lawmakers are engaged in an epic struggle over the fate of abortion pills. While some anti-abortion activists are attempting to drive the pills off the market entirely, supporters of reproductive rights are striving to make them more easily accessible. This Article advances the latter mission with a bold proposal: FDA should consider allowing abortion pills to be sold over the counter (OTC). Abortion rights supporters argue that FDA should repeal the special distribution and use restrictions it unnecessarily imposes on mifepristone, one of two drugs in the medication abortion regimen. Even if FDA removed these restrictions, however, …

The Ripple Effects Of Dobbs On Health Care Beyond Wanted Abortion, Maya Manian

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn fifty years of precedent on the constitutional right to abortion represents a sea of change, not only in constitutional law, but also in the public health landscape. Although state laws on abortion are still evolving after Dobbs, the decision almost immediately wreaked havoc on the delivery of medical care for both patients seeking abortion care and those not actively seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

This Article also argues that focusing the public’s attention on the deleterious consequences of abortion bans for health care beyond wanted abortion …

The Promise Of Telehealth For Abortion, Greer Donley, Rachel Rebouché

Book Chapters

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a transformation of abortion care. For most of the last half century, abortion was provided in clinics outside of the traditional healthcare setting. Though a medication regimen was approved in 2000 that would terminate a pregnancy without a surgical procedure, the Food & Drug Administration required, among other things, that the drug be dispensed in person. This requirement dramatically limited the medication’s promise to revolutionize abortion because it subjected medication abortion to the same physical barriers of procedural care.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that changed. The pandemic’s early days exposed how the …

Situating Dobbs, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

The recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has been characterized as an outlier because its effect is to erase a previously recognized constitutional right. This paper situates Dobbs in a broader feminist constitutional history. It asks if this retrenchment is really such a unique turn in American jurisprudence when it comes to protections or “rights” that matter most to women’s lived experience. The paper argues that if one opens the aperture of constitutional history to embrace a more capacious view of rights, those afforded to women have often been eroded or erased by state legislatures, Congress, and courts. …

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 …

Out Of Bounds?: Abortion, Choice Of Law, And A Modest Role For Congress, Susan Frelich Appleton

Scholarship@WashULaw

This invited contribution to a symposium on the multiple intersections of family law and constitutional law grapples with the emerging problems of jurisdictional competition and choice of law in interstate abortion situations in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—as abortion-hostile states seek to impose restrictions beyond their borders and welcoming states seek to become havens for abortion patients, regardless of their domicile. Grounded in a conflict-of-laws perspective, the essay lays out the interstate abortion chaos invited by Dobbs and the threat to our federal system that it presents, given Congress’s failure to codify a national right to …

Abortion Pills, David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, Rachel Rebouché

Articles

Abortion is now illegal in roughly a third of the country, but abortion pills are more widely available than ever before. Though antiabortion advocates and legislators are attacking pills with all manner of strategies, clinics, websites, and informal networks are openly facilitating the distribution of abortion pills, legally and illegally, across the United States. This Article is the first to explain this defining aspect of the post-Roe environment and the novel issues it raises at the level of state law, federal policy, and on-the-ground advocacy.

This Article first details antiabortion strategies to stop pills by any means necessary. These tactics …

State Constitutional Rights And Democratic Proportionality, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Miriam Seifter

Faculty Scholarship

State constitutional law is in the spotlight. As federal courts retrench on abortion, democracy, and more, state constitutions are defining rights across the nation. Despite intermittent calls for greater attention to state constitutional theory, neither scholars nor courts have provided a comprehensive account of state constitutional rights or a coherent framework for their adjudication. Instead, many state courts import federal interpretive practices that bear little relationship to state constitutions or institutions.

This Article seeks to begin a new conversation about state constitutional adjudication. It first shows how in myriad defining ways state constitutions differ from the U.S. Constitution: They protect …

A Way Forward After Dobbs: Human Rights Advocacy And Self-Managed Abortion In The United States, Kelly Keglovits

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

Even in the era before Dobbs, wherein the Supreme Court repeatedly classified abortion as a "fundamental right," the ability to have an abortion was inaccessible in many parts of the United States. The irony that a "fundamental right" was so difficult to exercise results from how Constitutional rights are understood, which left many open-ended avenues for states to bring restrictions. International Human Rights law, however, offers a more optimistic and accountable approach to steps forward in increasing abortion access—illustrating a need to bring a human rights-based approach home. Dobbs has eviscerated any concept of federal protections for abortion, severely worsening …

Dobbs Is Not A Religion Case, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

I was unhappy, but not surprised, to see Canopy Forum including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overruled Roe v. Wade, in a call for submissions under the rubric, “Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases.” I was not surprised because, for years, many critics have labeled pro-life opposition to Roe a purely religious viewpoint. But there is nothing inherently religious about qualms concerning abortion, nor is there anything specifically religious in the Dobbs majority opinion.

The End Of Roe V Wade And New Legal Frontiers On The Constitutional Right To Abortion, I. Glenn Cohen, Melissa Murray, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On June 24, 2002, the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court’s majority decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito was substantially the same as a draft opinion leaked a month earlier. The regulation of abortion will now be decided by the states, with about half currently or will soon ban or severely restrict abortion access. In this Viewpoint, we explain the Dobbs ruling and what it means for physicians, public health, and society.

We focus on new legal frontiers in the constitutional right to abortion, including medication abortion …

The Link Between Voting Rights And The Abortion Ruling, Katherine A. Shaw, Leah Litman, Melissa Murray

Online Publications

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gives states the maximum amount of freedom to restrict abortion. The decision is so sweeping that, under its logic, states could ban abortion even in cases of rape or incest; they may even be able — as the dissent notes — to prohibit abortions in circumstances in which a doctor believes the procedure is necessary to preserve the life or health of the pregnant person.

Think State Supreme Courts Will Save Abortion Rights? Think Again., Neal Devins

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Three Observations About Justice Alito's Draft Opinion In Dobbs - Commentary, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "There is much to say about Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which was leaked from the United States Supreme Court on May 2 [2022].

Obviously, the most significant direct consequence of the proposed decision, which overrules Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) while upholding the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that outlaws most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, would be the restriction or elimination of abortion services throughout much of the nation. This will have all sorts of attendant consequences, large and smaller, many of which …

Dobbs V. Jackson Women's Health Organization And The Likely End Of The Roe V. Wade Era, Jeffrey Hannan

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

No abstract provided.

Uprooting Roe, B. Jessie Hill, Mae Kuykendall

Faculty Publications

The U.S. Supreme Court is likely poised to overturn Roe v. Wade in a matter of months. Yet, the roots of Roe run both wide and deep, and to uproot Roe would be to uproot the Constitution’s promise of gender equality in a radical way. Just as the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of reproductive liberty freed people with reproductive capacity from having their destinies and status tied to their biology, an uprooting of Roe and its companion principles will restore the iron rules of gender difference and return women to their common-law status as lacking self-ownership and equal citizenship.

Medication Abortion Exceptionalism, Greer Donley

Articles

Restrictive state abortion laws garner a large amount of attention in the national conversation and legal scholarship, but less known is a federal abortion policy that significantly curtails access to early abortion in all fifty states. The policy limits the distribution of mifepristone, the only drug approved to terminate a pregnancy so long as it is within the first ten weeks. Unlike most drugs, which can be prescribed by licensed healthcare providers and picked up at most pharmacies, the Food and Drug Administration only allows certified providers to prescribe mifepristone, and only allows those providers to distribute the drug to …