Thursday, October 30, 2008

Reppert Contra Mundum

“I am even less sure that I would know how to produce a good legal argument against Roe v. Wade, because in a legal context you have ways of blocking the sorts of ‘err on the side of life’ arguments that I would use if I were trying to talk someone I knew not to get an abortion. And I have even more serious doubts about the standard conservative attack on Roe: that it involved judicial activism. It seems to me that the right of privacy is constitutionally grounded.”

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2008/10/response-to-jim-jordan.html

"The Supreme Court also, and very dramatically, decriminalized abortion in the famous case of Roe v. Wade (1973). Politically, this was--and remains--a bombshell. Legally speaking, the case rested on the constitutional right to privacy--a concept (one must admit) that has only the flimsiest connection with the actual text of the constitution." -- Lawrence Friedman (Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford University), A History of American Law, 3rd edition, 2005, p.570.

"It could be noted that to the 'Dirty Dozen' examples included here, we could have added many others. There is, for instance, the Supreme Court's highly controversial 1973 decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, every aspect of which was faulty--the constitutional arguments, the bioethical arguments, and the historical arguments--as even many proponents of abortion rights acknowledge. (For instance, legal scholar John Ely, writing in the Yale Law Journal, condemned the Roe decision 'because it is bad constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be')." -- Thomas Woods (PH.D., Columbia) & Kevin Gutzman (PH.D., Virginia), Who Killed the Constitution?, Crown Forum, 2008, p.199

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