In this episode, Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel join Julie and Jed to mark fifty years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision recognizing a woman’s right to abortion. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, how should Roe be remembered?
Roe was much more than a Supreme Court decision. It was an event that changed the course of women's lives around the world. How do we commemorate it, especially after the Supreme Court overruled the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health last year?
Linda Greenhouse is the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for the New York Times from 1978 to 2007. She continues to contribute op-eds regularly at the New York Times, and is a clinical lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School and author of, most recently, Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court (2022) and "Does the War Over Abortion Have a Future?" (NY Times Jan. 18, 2022).
Professor Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Siegel’s highly influential and prolific writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. Her most recent article, of relevance to today’s conversation is Memory Games: Dobbs’s Originalism as Anti-Democratic Living Constitutionalism — and Some Pathways for Resistance, forthcoming in the Texas Law Review. She is the author, along with Melissa Murray and Serena Mayeri, of the Amicus Brief of Equal Protection Law Scholars in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health(2021), making equality-based constitutional arguments for abortion rights.
Further reading:
Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (2010).
Linda Greenhouse, “Requiem for the Supreme Court,” N.Y. Times, June 24, 2022
Reva B. Siegel & Douglas Nejaime, Answering the Lochner Objection: Substantive Due Process and the Role of Courts in a Democracy, 96 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1902 (2021)
Reva B. Siegel & Cary Franklin, Equality Emerges As A Ground for Abortion Rights (SSRN, 2022).