In the wake of the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade I thought I’d take a moment and make some comments about this infamous and divisive legal opinion. What is below is an expression of a lawyer’s take on Justice Blackmun’s opinion, which this lawyer views as a pockmark on American jurisprudence, not just from a moral perspective but especially from a legal point of view. For those of you who have never read the opinion, I encourage you to do so, and also to peruse its sister case, Doe v. Bolton. Before I dive into the Roe v. Wade opinion, I think it’s important that the reader understand that Roe wasn’t only decided based on penumbras and emanations from the Bill of Rights. Instead, Roe should be viewed as the fourth corner of a series of legal decisions, the collection of which now forms the basis for the Supreme Court’s social-policy jurisprudence. The first corner of the foundation is the now-infamous Dred Scott Decision, for it was in the Court’s ruminations on that case where substa...
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