by Jeremy Leaming
As noted in a Nov. 2 piece for The Huffington Post by ACS President Caroline Fredrickson, the make-up of the nation’s top court rests on tenuous ground – with one more conservative justice helping its conservative bloc turn the clock back on longstanding precedent protecting an array of rights, such as reproductive rights.
Fredrickson notes, “As recently as 2007, the Court upheld burdensome restrictions on abortion rights in Gonzales v. Carhart,” and that a “more conservative Court “could easily further restrict women’s r
eproductive rights, chipping away at Roe v. Wade or undoing it altogether.” (Fredrickson’s post notes the recent ACS paper, “Courts Matter: Justice on the Line,” which provides numerous examples of Supreme Court precedent that could be fundamentally altered with the change in the make-up of the high court.)
Duke School of Law Professor Neil S. Siegel, also in a piece for The Huffington Post, zeroes in on the importance of the Supreme Court’s role in protecting or eviscerating reproductive rights. Siegel, also co-director of the Program in Public Law at Duke’s law school, writes how close the high court, in the past, has come to overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade. In the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy had narrowly joined the majority in upholding Roe. But since Casey, Siegel continues, Kennedy “has voted to uphold abortion-restrictive regulations that deny pregnant women the safest method of abortion in medical emergencies.”
you’ll see that the federal court system has nearly 80 vacancies, with more than 30 of those vacancies deemed “emergency vacancies” by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts of the federal bench. So as the editorial notes, access to justice continues to be a tougher endeavor since courts are not running efficiently. As The Times puts it:
e of same-sex marriage.
ut, such as corporate funding of elections, abortion rights, voting rights, privacy rights and equality. The paper speculates on how a more conservative or progressive high court might address some of the nation’s most pressing legal concerns.