Legal History Commons^™

Grassroots Originalism: Rethinking The Politics Of Judicial Philosophy, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

How has originalism become so politically successful? In answering this question, leading scholarship has focused on the ways in which political leaders, judges, and lawyers have cultivated popular support for originalism. In one account, legal academics, politicians, and judges have explained the legal merits of originalism as a method of interpretation: its political neutrality and its democratic legitimacy. In a second version, political leaders—in particular, the Reagan Administration and the judges it nominated—made apparent that originalism would often produce outcomes that social conservatives found satisfactory. With some exceptions, leading studies primarily address the contributions made by elites to rhetoric about …

Sexing Harris: The Law And Politics Of Defunding Planned Parenthood, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

The movement to defund Planned Parenthood has opened a new front in the abortion wars. At the state and national level, anti-abortion organizations have campaigned successfully for new legal limitations on Medicaid or Title X reimbursement for Planned Parenthood. Significantly, legal restrictions reach not only abortion but also other services like contraception and cancer screenings. North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Indiana are among the states to have introduced such bans, and the U.S. House of Representatives approved one before the proposal died in the Senate in April 2011.

At first, the novelty of the movement seems to lie in its open …

The Possibility Of Compromise: Antiabortion Moderates After Roe V. Wade, Mary Ziegler

Scholarly Publications

Did Roe v. Wade destroy the possibility for compromise in the abortion debate? Leading studies argue that Roe itself radicalized debate and marginalized antiabortion moderates, either by issuing a sweeping decision before adequate public support had developed or by framing the opinion in terms of moral absolutes. Others rely on this history in criticizing the sweeping privacy framework set out in Roe, attributing the radicalization of the general discussion and the antiabortion movement to the timing, reach, or framing of the abortion right in the opinion.

The polarization narrative on which leading studies rely obscures important actors and arguments that …