March 12, 2005
SHE'S GOT A VOTE ON IT, NO?:
Ginsburg: Roe decision seemed 'not the way courts generally work' (Associated Press, 3/11/05)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, considered an abortion rights supporter on the U.S. Supreme Court, told law students that the court's historic Roe v. Wade decision "seemed to me not the way courts generally work."Ginsburg visited the University of Kansas campus Thursday for a question-and-answer session with students and faculty. She touched on the 1973 ruling legalizing abortion across the nation and discussed her experiences as one of Harvard University's few female law students in the late 1950s.
Before her appointment to the court in 1993, Ginsburg had said the nation might have been better off if abortion rights had been established more gradually. She served as the first director of the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and was the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
When the court decided Roe v. Wade, Ginsburg said, "The law was changing."
"Women were lobbying around that issue," she said. "The Supreme Court stopped all that by deeming every law - even the most liberal - as unconstitutional. That seemed to me not the way courts generally work."
Justices sometimes comment publicly on past cases, though they typically avoid discussing cases still actually pending. At least three - Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - have said Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overturned.
It'd be morbidly amusing to see her vote to reverse it with O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter on the other side. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2005 2:35 PM
Which side did she take on the reversal of the youngster's death penalty case handed down earlier this week?
Posted by: jdkelly at March 12, 2005 3:23 PMIt's largely forgotten now, but abortion rights were being established more gradually at the time of Roe v. Wade. About a third of the population lived in states where it was legal (to one degree or another).
Imagine how much less political hot air there would have been over the decades if this issue had been left to the states, as it should have been....
Posted by: PapayaSF at March 12, 2005 4:25 PMOh, but changing it back now would undermine stare decisis and the Supreme Court's institutional prestige, and besides, that's not how courts usually ought to work, either.
Of course she voted "Zimbabwe" in Roper v. Simmons. The law was changing, but now it's stopped, you see. Fiat lux.
Posted by: Random Lawyer at March 12, 2005 4:32 PMShe voted for the constitutional right to sodomy in Lawrence. The substantive due process theory behind Lawrence is derrived from Roe. If Roe is bad law (and it is) so is Lawrence and if she were serious about her comment, she would have voted with the dissenters in lawrence.
The fact that she acknowledges that Roe is bad law, and she voted with the majority in Lawrence demonstrates how cynical and political SCOTUS is.
Time to get rid of them and start from scratch.
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In 1756, the British Admiralty sent Admiral John Byng to prevent the French from taking Minorca. Byng arrived when the island was already under siege, and, after an indecisive naval engagement, withdrew without relieving the siege. Byng was court-martialed and hanged for "failure to do his utmost." This brought charges that he had been used as a scapegoat for ministerial failure. On his tombstone it says "bravery and loyalty were insufficient securities for the life and honour of a naval officer."
French author Francois Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778, "Voltaire") had his fictional character Candide witness such a hanging in the eponymous novel and remark:
"Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres."
"In this country it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others."