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What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Most Controversial Decision, Revised Edition

Online ISBN:
9781479824465
Print ISBN:
9781479824489
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Most Controversial Decision, Revised Edition

Jack M. Balkin (ed.)
Jack M. Balkin
(ed.)
Yale University
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Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
17 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9781479824465
Print ISBN:
9781479824489
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

This is a book about one of the Supreme Court’s most famous decisions, Roe v. Wade, and about the constitutional right to abortion a half century after it was first announced. It is also about the role of courts in defining and enforcing fundamental rights in a constitutional democracy and how the work of courts necessarily interacts with and is affected by the work of legislatures, political parties, and social movements. And in 2022, decades of mobilization by abortion opponents culminated in the Supreme Court overruling Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Woman’s Health Organization. The debate over abortion rights did not occur solely within the framework set by Roe but continually put the very legitimacy of the decision into question. Reappraising the premises of an important decision like Roe v. Wade with the hindsight of later experience is a valuable exercise even if particular changes of wording might have had little effect, especially as Roe v. Wade is a paradigmatic case for American constitutional scholarship.

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