From the oral arguments regarding the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case currently before the Supreme Court. And my responses to them. Because you know I don’t lack for hubris.
Perhaps the most famous example of overturned precedent was the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling, which reversed Plessy v Ferguson….
Well, there was another, preceding case—the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dred Scott v Sandford, which needed a Civil War to overturn because the Justices on the Taney Court and later lacked the integrity, the morals, the courage to overturn the ruling on their own.
And from CJ Roberts,
If we look at it from today’s perspective, it’s going to be a long list of cases that we’re going to say were wrongly decided.
If those rulings were wrongly decided at the outset, of course they should be reversed. Wrong doesn’t become right through the hoariness of age.
If the conditions of those rulings no longer exist, of course they should be reversed. The convenience of the Court isn’t relevant to any of that.
Additionally, Stewart gave Roberts a way out by saying Roberts’ examples are settled.
And,
“What would you say to the argument that has been made many times by people who are pro-choice and pro-life, that the line really doesn’t make any sense—that it is, as Justice Blackman himself described it, arbitrary?” Alito asked Rikelman.
Alito noted that while a woman may still want to terminate a pregnancy after viability, a “fetus has an interest in having a life” both before and after.
Rikelman replied[,] “It is principled because in ordering the interests at stake, the court had to set a line between conception and birth.”
Rikelman evaded Alito’s question. The baby always has an interest—the primary interest in the ordering of interests—in its own life.
Finally,
…a Supreme Court that has undergone enormous changes and currently sits at a 6-3 conservative majority.
No, it doesn’t. At best it sits at a 5-3-1 majority.