Gender and the Law Blog

New Book Justice Jackson's Autobiography

Kimberly Robinson, Book Review, Justice Jackson had "Wrenching Time" as Big Law Working Mom, reviewing Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described her return to law firm life after the birth of her first daughter as “wrenching,” saying she “drastically underestimated the challenges of new motherhood.”

“I can honestly say that going back into the office as a new mother, and returning to the cadence and pressures of Big Law, was the stuff of nightmares,” Jackson said in her memoir, “Lovely One,” which was released Tuesday.

She describes the challenges of commuting, breastfeeding, and having to slip out of the office apologetically “at the unspeakably early hour of five P.M. each workday.” And in particular, she details the isolation and lack of motivation she felt of returning to Goodwin Procter after four months of maternity leave.

For “me, there was a hollowness to the corporate law enterprise,” Jackson wrote.

Interrogating Dobbs's Claim to Vindicate Democracy

Katherine Shaw & Melissa Murray, Dobbs and Democracy, 137 Harvard L. Rev. 738 (2024)  In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s

Health Organization, Justice Alito justified the decision to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey with an appeal to democracy. He insisted that it was “time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” This invocation of democracy had undeniable rhetorical power: it allowed the Dobbs majority to lay waste to decades’ worth of precedent, while rebutting charges of judicial imperialism and purporting to restore the people’s voices. This Article interrogates Dobbs’s claim to vindicate principles of democracy, examining both the intellectual pedigree of this claim and its substantive vision of democracy.

In grounding its decision in democracy, the Dobbs majority relied on a well-worn but dubious narrative: that Roe, and later Casey, disrupted ongoing democratic deliberation on the abortion issue, wresting this contested question from the people and imposing the Court’s own will. The majority insisted that this critique had always attended Roe. However, in tracing the provenance of the democratic deliberation argument, this Article finds more complicated intellectual origins. In fact, the argument did not surface in Roe’s immediate aftermath, but rather emerged years later. And it did so not organically, but through a series of interconnected legal, movement, and political efforts designed to undermine and ultimately topple Roe and Casey. The product of these efforts, the Dobbs majority’s claim that democracy demanded overruling Roe and Casey, was deployed to overcome the force of stare decisis in Dobbs — and may ultimately reshape the scope and substance of the Court’s stare decisis analysis in future cases.

Having identified the intellectual origins of the democratic deliberation argument and its contemporary consequences, this Article examines the contours of the Dobbs majority’s vision of democratic deliberation. We show that although Dobbs trafficked in the rhetoric of democracy, its conception of democracy was both internally inconsistent and extraordinarily limited, even myopic. The opinion misapprehended the processes and institutions that are constitutive of democracy, focusing on state legislatures while overlooking a range of other federal, state, and local constitutional actors. As troublingly, it reflected a distorted understanding of political power and representation — one that makes political power reducible to voting, entirely overlooking metrics like representation in electoral office and in the ecosystem of campaign finance. The opinion was also willfully blind to the antidemocratic implications of its “history and tradition” interpretive method, which binds the recognition of constitutional rights to a past in which very few Americans were meaningful participants in the production of law and legal meaning. The deficits of the Dobbs majority’s conception of democracy appear even more pronounced when considered alongside the Court’s recent and active interventions to distort and disrupt the functioning of the electoral process. Indeed, Dobbs purported to “return” the abortion question to the people and to democratic deliberation at the precise moment when the Court’s own actions have ensured that the extant system is unlikely either to produce genuine deliberation or to yield widely desired outcomes.

Ultimately, a close examination of the Dobbs majority’s invocation of democracy suggests that the majority may have employed the values and vernacular of democracy as a means to a different end. As we explain, the majority’s embrace of democracy and democratic deliberation allowed it to shield its actions from claims of judicial activism and overreach. More profoundly, and perhaps paradoxically, the opinion may lay the groundwork for the eventual vindication and protection of particular minority interests — those of the fetus. With this in mind, the Dobbs majority’s settlement of the abortion question is unlikely to be a lasting one. Indeed, aspects of the opinion suggest that this settlement is merely a way station en route to a more permanent resolution — the recognition of fetal personhood and the total abolition of legal abortion in the United States.

Revisiting the Legacy of a Feminist Icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Deborah Brake, Gender and the Law: Revisiting the Legacy of a Feminist Icon, Ch. 1 in THE JURISPRUDENTIAL LEGACY OF JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG (Ryan Vacca & Ann Bartow, eds., NYU Press 2023)

Justice Ginsburg attained celebrity status in her later years as the voice of feminism from the bench, but her influence on law and gender was not always so venerated. For much of her career, feminist scholarly criticism of her gender jurisprudence was sharp. Critics called the approach “formal equality,” pointing out that it benefited those women most similarly situated to men. The criticism echoed that leveled against her strategy as a litigator representing male plaintiffs. In recent years, Justice Ginsburg’s legacy has been burnished by a fresh interpretation crediting it with a more robust vision of gender equality than previously appreciated. This chapter contends that, while far from radical, the Justice’s gender jurisprudence is a product of a jurist committed to minimizing the role of gender as a site of social and economic oppression.

Although Justice Ginsburg’s impact on gender equality can fill a book on its own, this chapter focuses on identifying and explaining three core themes: an antipathy toward gender stereotypes embedded in the law; a vision of gender equality that transcends formal equality; and a recognition of the centrality of reproductive freedom to women’s equality. Each of these themes has been advanced, albeit imperfectly, by Justice Ginsburg’s career as a litigator and a jurist.

Understanding the Original Meaning of Washington v. Glucksberg and its Use in the Dobbs Abortion Decision

Marc Spindelman, Washington v. Glucksberg's Original Meaning

This Article elaborates and defends Washington v. Glucksberg's original meaning both on its own terms and against accounts of Glucksberg that depict it as having announced and followed a strict test of history and tradition as its basic approach to Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process rights.  
 
The nominal occasion for the present return to Glucksberg and its original meaning is the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Dobbs famously insists that Glucksberg supplies it with the authoritative grounds in the Court's Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process jurisprudence for its own history-and-tradition-based approach to Roe v. Wade and constitutional abortion rights. As Dobbs figures it, Glucksberg signs the constitutional warrant that Dobbs enforces by overturning Roe.   

Proceeding in stages, the Article traces Dobbs' reliance on Glucksberg before pivoting to a detailed account of Glucksberg's original meaning, which engages and surmounts Dobbs' undefended tally of Glucksberg. Having shown Dobbs' reading of Glucksberg cannot be squared with Glucksberg's text and its meaning--as crosschecked against other Supreme Court decisions, as well as new sources found in the Supreme Court archives--the work explains that Dobbs is also deficient in not providing an independent, full-blown justification, beyond Glucksberg's invocation, for its basic, if contoured, constitutional interpretive method of decision. In context, Dobbs' failure to offer this kind of public accounting, consistent with constitutional and rule-of-law demands, means that Dobbs stands exposed as lawless at its foundations. Dobbs is thus primed for challenge on these grounds, the very terms of legality that Dobbs deploys as it eliminates Roe and constitutional abortion rights.

 

Velte on "The Supreme Court's Gaslight Docket"

Kyle Velte has published "The Supreme Court's Gaslight Docket" in Volume 96 of the Temple Law Review. Here is the article's abstract: 

The U.S. Supreme Court's new conservative supermajority is gaslighting the American public. This Article takes a systematic look at key cases from the Court's October 2021 Term through the lens of gaslighting. It describes these cases as being part of what it dubs the Court's “gaslight docket,” a descriptor that provides a useful and potentially unifying theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the Court's recent onslaught of rights-diminishing precedents.

The concept of gaslighting gained cultural purchase in the 1944 film Gaslight. Since then, the concept has been the subject of academic and theoretical inquiry. This Article identifies gaslighting in both oral arguments and written decisions of the Court's civil rights cases. It reveals that this gaslighting is transsubstantive, spanning cases involving voting rights, race discrimination, affirmative action, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and the First Amendment's religion clauses.

Because gaslighting has epistemic dimensions--knowledge production and gaslighting are connected--gaslighters instill epistemic doubt in their victims as a way to have the gaslighter's production of knowledge “count” and to dismiss as unfounded other understandings of the world. The U.S. Supreme Court is an especially powerful “knower”--indeed, it is given the position of ultimate “knower” of the meaning and application of the Constitution. With each case it decides, the Court produces legal knowledge in the form of rules that must be followed in similar subsequent cases.

The results of the October 2021 Term were astounding. Across multiple substantive areas, the Court issued decidedly anti-equality and antidemocratic decisions that threaten the promise of equal citizenship for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. In so doing, the Court elevated the interests of the white Christian nationalist movement, declaring that those interests are not coequal with the interests of marginalized groups but instead are interests that will be treated as “most favored” by the Court.

After describing the academic literature on gaslighting, the Article applies the gaslighting analytical frame to a sampling of recent Supreme Court civil rights cases. It argues that the gaslighting framework does important work in revealing an alarming trend of privileging white Christian nationalist ideals at the expense of the rights of marginalized communities. It explains why the gaslighting framing matters for civil rights advocates across causes and proposes ways in which movement lawyers and movement judges can expose this oppressive move by the Court, learn from it, and counter it.

New Study of the Rhetoric of Abortion in Supreme Court Amicus Briefs

Congrats to my co-blogger, Prof. Jamie Abrams on the coverage of her research on abortion amicus briefs in the New York Times.

NYT, In Abortion Cases, Legions of "Friends" Seek to Persuade the Supreme Court

*** In the decision that overturned Roe in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court was flooded with more than 140 amicus briefs. The footnote had metastasized, spanning seven pages.

Those 50 years of amicus briefs tell a cumulative story, one explored in a new study published in The Missouri Law Review, “The Rhetoric of Abortion in Amicus Briefs.” Using corpus linguistics, a social-science tool that analyzes patterns of words in large databases, the study found that the briefs “serve as a barometer revealing how various constituencies talk about abortion, women, fetuses, physicians, rights and harms over time.”

The study, conducted by Jamie R. Abrams, a law professor at American University, and Amanda Potts, who teaches at Cardiff University, concluded that opponents of abortion had in some ways been more effective, remaining “resolutely intent on advancing fetal personhood.” The anti-abortion briefs were nimble, they wrote, and were “able to adapt and evolve in response to doctrinal shifts of the court.”

Overall, the authors wrote, abortion opponents had pressed “a more relentlessly human, emotional, personal attack to pursue its political agenda.”

The authors, self-described feminist scholars, wrote that supporters of abortion rights “simply could not counter these arguments within conventional advocacy strategies.”

I have also noticed as well that particular in the abortion amicus briefs allegedly revealing the "history" of abortion, that the history is merely partisan advocacy and junk science. And that the amicus of the historians, like the American Historical Association in Dobbs, are disregarded.

SCOTUS Upholds Gun Ban for Domestic Violence Restraining Orders

Supreme Court Upholds Gun Ban for Domestic Violence Restraining Orders

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law that prevents people who are subject to domestic-violence restraining orders from having firearms in its first major Second Amendment decision since a 2022 ruling that expanded gun rights.

The court said the Constitution permits laws that strip guns from those deemed dangerous, one of a number of firearms restrictions that have been imperiled since the conservative majority bolstered gun rights in its decision two years ago known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

In an 8-1 decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote that “an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”

Bruen required the government to point to historic analogues when defending laws that place limits on firearms, leading to a spate of court challenges against limits on possessing firearms — including the one in this case, United States v. Rahimi.

The opinion is here: US v. Rahimi.

Justice Thomas was the lone dissent. He dissented on the grounds of history and tradition:

After New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. 1 (2022), this Court’s directive was clear: A firearm regulation that falls within the Second Amendment’s plain text is unconstitutional unless it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Not a
single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue, 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(8). Therefore, I respectfully dissent

SCOTUS Unanimously Upholds FDA Rule on Abortion Pill on Grounds of Standing

In an unanimous opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the lower court's invalidation of the FDA's current rules on the permissibility of the abortion pill, mifepristone.  The opinion is based solely on standing, finding that the pro-life physicians did not have standing to seek an opinion on the pill because they did not use, prescribe, or manufacture the pill. Instead, they sought to address others' personal use -- a fatal flaw for standing.

A concurrence by Justice Thomas goes deeper into associational third-party standing. There is a brief paragraph of particular interest to Remedies scholars, where Thomas discusses redressability and cites, Grupo Mexicano, Uzuegbunam, and universal injunctions.

The case is: FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Oath, 602 U.S. ___ (June 13, 2024).

One favorite line:  "An Article III Court is not a legislative assembly, a town square, or a faculty lounge."

 

Sweeny and Canon on "The Language of Love v. Beshear"

JoAnne Sweeny and Dan Canon have published The Language of Love v. Beshear: Telling a Client's Story While Creating a Civil Rights Case Narrative in volume 17 of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors. The article was shared on SSRN here. The Introduction is excerpted here: 

We tend to think of a good lawyer as being a vigorous, focused advocate, one who thinks first and foremost of the interests, needs, and desires of their clients. But what if the client’s case will affect an entire group of people; a group who may also seek to have its collective rights vindicated? This is the dilemma of the civil rights attorney—how does an effective advocate balance the specific needs of the client with the broader, long-term needs of the group the client represents? And who should have a say in what story is told on behalf of the client? In civil rights cases, it is not just the client, but activists, organizations, academics, and the media who have a stake in the outcome. How much of a say should they have in the creation of a litigation story that will most directly impact a single client? How are those stories crafted? With careless, blunt-force litigation, or with purposefulness? And does it matter who gets to tell the story?

 

* * *

Focusing on the Kentucky case, Love v. Beshear, this article shows how civil rights attorneys may be constrained by their dual roles—advisors to their clients and advocates for civil rights—and how they decide what story to tell to remain true to their clients’ needs while keeping engaged with the larger civil rights issues inherent in these impact litigation cases. Moreover, once the litigation has begun, the other players—organizations, media, even the judges themselves—can change the story, highlighting what they see fit. The ultimate story of who a lawyer’s clients are ultimately may not be up to the lawyer or the client.  

 

It concludes: 

 

Obergefell built a bridge to same-sex marriage, creating solid ground for the next group of civil rights lawyers
to again expand our understanding of what relationships and “equal dignity” really mean. As the country’s understanding of same-sex couples has evolved, so has the array of stories that lawyers can tell about groups that may be insular or unfamiliar to the broader public. For example, now that transgender, bisexual, nonbinary, and polyamorous people’s stories are becoming more mainstream, their stories can be used to champion a broader understanding (and legal recognition) of fundamental rights. This continuous opening of new chapters to familiar stories is the essence of civil rights advocacy.

Misogyny at the Supreme Court in Debating Emergency Abortion

Dahlia Lithwick & Mark Joseph Stern, The Lawyer Defending Idaho’s Abortion Ban Irritated the One Justice He Needed on His Side, Slate

Justice Amy Coney Barrett famously provided the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. So if you are arguing in favor of an abortion ban, you probably don’t want to alienate Barrett—by, say, condescendingly dismissing her concerns when she points out that your legal theory doesn’t make any sense. Yet that is what Joshua Turner did on Wednesday while defending Idaho’s draconian abortion restrictions, and much to Barrett’s evident irritation. Turner—who represented the Idaho solicitor general’s office in the second major abortion case to come before the high court after it promised us in its Dobbs opinion that the court was out of the abortion business in 2022—might just have lost his case by repeatedly mansplaining his self-contradictory position to Barrett and the other three women justices. In his toneless, dispassionate telling, his entirely incomprehensible position was just too complex for them to understand. And so he just kept repeating it, over and over. These justices, including Barrett, sounded increasingly fed up with his chin-stroking dissembling on an issue that’s literally life-or-death for pregnant women in red states. If the court’s male members noticed Turner’s dismissive attitude toward their colleagues, they didn’t care. The gender divide on the court has never been so revealing.

Perhaps because Dobbs was a threat to unknown future women, whereas real women are now being left to hemorrhage, lose the functioning of their reproductive organs, or be popped onto helicopters to receive out-of-state stabilizing care, none of the life-and-death harms being experienced in red states around the country feel very theoretical to anyone who has thought about pregnancy in a serious way. Yet, for male justices more worried about harms to the spending clause, nothing about potentially lethal pregnancies warranted even a moment’s pause.

Wednesday’s case, Moyle v. United States, revolves around a clash between Idaho law and a 1986 federal statute called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (or EMTALA). Idaho’s abortion ban has no exception for the health of the patient; rather, it criminalizes abortion unless it’s “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” ***

When Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar had her turn at the lectern, she faced a barrage of questions from Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch about whether Congress had run afoul of the spending clause when it passed EMTALA, an issue that was not briefed and should not be in the case. Samuel Alito, who brought all of his dictionary-wielding and woman-erasing skills from his star turn in Dobbs to bear, devoted his time to defending the “unborn child” who—in his view—was the real goal of EMTALA’s drafters, laying the groundwork for fetal personhood arguments that were too radioactive even for Turner to take on. Alito hectored Prelogar about her grasp of preemption, her reading of text, and her understanding of the term “unborn child,” casting her as some drunk lunatic who had staggered into court without any comprehension of the law.

Throughout the day doctors were referenced as “he” whereas every nurse was a “she.” Women were, as Alito conceded, “individuals,” but man, oh man, are they ever whiny and demanding. Alito also breathlessly cited Ronald Reagan as the deity who signed EMTALA and would never have wanted it to undermine the precious rights of “unborn children.” And a little “temporary” organ damage, he mused, might not be so bad if suffered for the benefit of a fetus. The task fell to Kagan to remind everyone that in the few months that Idaho has enforced its near-total ban, six women have already been airlifted to other states to receive emergency abortions that are criminal under Idaho law. Real women, flown out in great pain and at great expense, to get treatment that is objectively recognized as the standard of care

 

 

NYT Coverage of Brenda Andrew's Case and Submitted Sex Stereotyping Amicus Brief

Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote on April 1st covering Brenda Andrew's case before the Supreme Court. The article, titled Did Prosecutors’ Sex Shaming Help Send Brenda Andrew to Death Row?, included a cite to the amicus brief previously covered by this Blog and available here. The article cites one of Andrew's lawyers stating: 

Every single day the state was presenting gendered evidence about her appearance, about her clothing, about her sexual practices, about her skills as a mother,” she said. “We’ve got someone who is at risk of execution for not conforming to gender stereotypes.

The Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case. The questions on certiorari are excerpted below from the full opinion. 

1. Whether clearly established federal law as determined by this Court forbids the prosecution’s use of a woman’s plainly irrelevant sexual history, gender presentation, and role as a mother and wife to assess guilt and punishment.
   
2. Whether this Court should summarily reverse in light of cumulative effect of the errors in this case at guilt and sentencing, including the introduction of a custodial statement made without the warnings Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966) requires.

SCOTUS to Consider Whether Gender Bias and Sex Shaming Contributed to Death Penalty Conviction

NY Times, Did Prosecutors' Sex Shaming Help Send Brenda Andrew to Death Row?

*** 

Later this month, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear Ms. Andrew’s appeal, which said the display of her underwear was a representative part of an unrelenting strategy by prosecutors, as a dissenting judge put it, “of introducing evidence that has no purpose other than to hammer home that Brenda Andrew is a bad wife, a bad mother and a bad woman.”

Nathalie Greenfield, one of Ms. Andrew’s lawyers, said gender stereotypes infected the trial and poisoned the jury.

“Every single day the state was presenting gendered evidence about her appearance, about her clothing, about her sexual practices, about her skills as a mother,” she said. “We’ve got someone who is at risk of execution for not conforming to gender stereotypes.” ***

“Gender bias is normalized and tolerated to an extent that racial bias no longer is in the administration of the death penalty,” said Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell who represents Ms. Andrew in a related case. “Women on trial for capital murder have been subjected to similar shaming tactics for hundreds of years.”

In urging the Supreme Court not to hear the case, Andrew v. White, No. 23-6573, prosecutors said almost nothing to justify using evidence about Ms. Andrew’s appearance and sexuality. They argued instead that it was “but a drop in the ocean” in the case against her. State and federal appeals courts have more or less agreed, suggesting that the prosecutors’ presentation was regrettable but that there was ample evidence of Ms. Andrew’s guilt

See Supreme Court Amicus Brief Argues Brenda Andrew's Capital Murder Case Used Prejudicial "Sexualized Evidence", Gender & the Law Blog.

The Critical Role of History After Dobbs

Serena Mayeri, The Critical Role of History After Dobbs, 2 Journal of American Constitutional History 171 (Winter 2024)

The Dobbs majority’s reliance on a flawed and impoverished account of “history and tradition” to deny fundamental freedoms today may tempt us to despair of appealing to the past as a source of constitutional rights or principles. But the problem with Dobbs is not its discussion of history per se; rather, it is how and for what purposes the Court looks to the past. History need not preserve archaic values; it can counsel against past errors and justify affirmative approaches to protecting rights and combating inequality.

This essay explores critical roles for history in legal, constitutional, and political arguments about reproductive freedom and democracy after Dobbs. These critical approaches define differently the historical voices and sources that matter; the constitutional principles and lessons to be drawn from the past; and the roles that history and tradition should play in shaping our present and future. Critical histories read the Reconstruction Amendments as a mandate for emancipation and for the eradication of all forms of bodily and reproductive coercion. They elevate the voices of those who long were excluded from political participation and place abortion restrictions in a longer history of reproductive control and anti-democratic political traditions. Critical histories can and do inform the interpretation of state as well as federal constitutional provisions in and outside of court. From courtrooms, legislatures, and campuses to workplaces, street protests, and dinner tables, these histories play a more crucial role than ever in informing legal and political discourse about reproductive justice and the future of democracy.

Neoshia Roemer on "Equity for American Indian Families"

Neoshia Roemer has posted her work-in-progress, Equity for American Indian Families, on SSRN. The abstract previews: 

Recently, the Supreme Court opined on the Indian Child Welfare Act’s (“ICWA”) constitutionality in Haaland v. Brackeen. Despite its opponents’ penchant for creating well curated and financially resourced cases before the Roberts court, which has shown its hand at being the “post-racial” court and friend of the conservative legal movement, ICWA survived.

While Brackeen was an invigorating win for ICWA, it declined to answer an important question: whether ICWA would survive a challenge under the equal protection doctrine. Although equal protection is always a topic that gains the attention of the legal academy because of its purported social justice potential, equal protection as to Indian law creates a more complex conversation as an adverse ruling on equal protection could essentially dismantle federal Indian law—the body of law that governs the self-determination of American Indian Tribes—piece by piece.

Brackeen epitomized American equality. By using equal protection claims to demand a uniformity that has never existed for anyone except America’s rights holders, ICWA’s opponents attempted to further the colonial extraction of Tribes’ most important resources: their children. Like the American mythos that proudly boasts we are all created equal, opponents of ICWA further colonial assimilation by projecting a specific brand of American identity that prioritizes the “good parent” or “right kind of families” vis a vis the rights of white parents with means over others. Equality—the kind best (mis)understood to mean that everyone is operating on the same level playing field—is neither conducive nor responsive to ICWA’s goals.

Moving beyond arguments over whether strict scrutiny or rational basis should define ICWA in an equal protection challenge, this Article encourages a new framework altogether: anti-colonial equity. ICWA is not a racial remedy or panacea. It represents the pursuit of equal justice. Amidst a history of removal policies, ICWA has been a vehicle for Tribes securing their futures; it is those futures that ICWA’s opponents seek to remove now in the light of a legal tradition that has increasingly perverted the concept of equality under the law. As such, this Article challenges the notion that equality is the appropriate framework for an ICWA challenge and proposes a reconsideration of ICWA as anti-colonial equity statute as it was created and executed through American legal history and tradition.

SCOTUS Denies Cert in Case About Whether Jurors Can Be Excluded for Religious Beliefs Against Lesbian Plaintiff

Lawrence Hurley, NBC News, Supreme Court Declines to Weigh Whether Jurors Can Be Excluded for Religious Beliefs in Case Involving Lesbian Plaintiff

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to consider whether potential jurors in an employment dispute involving a lesbian worker could be excluded because of their religious views on homosexuality.

The court rejected an appeal brought by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, in a case involving allegations of employment discrimination against the state’s Department of Corrections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote a statement saying he agreed with the decision not to take up the case for technical legal reasons, but said that it raises important issues.

Jean Finney, an employee, sued the department, saying she was retaliated against by a colleague after she began a same-sex relationship with his former spouse.

During the jury selection process, Finney's lawyer asked potential jurors if they had traditional religious beliefs or had been brought up to believe that "people that are homosexuals shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else."

Based on previous Supreme Court decisions, lawyers are allowed to exclude potential jurors without stating a reason but are barred from doing so on the basis of race and gender.

The case largely focuses on two jurors who said they believed that homosexual activity was a sin. But, the state argues, the jurors also said they believed that homosexuals should have the same rights as everyone else. The judge ultimately excluded three jurors who said they had conservative Christian beliefs.

The Future of Constitutional Sex Equality Rights after Dobbs

Marc Spindelman, Dobbs' Sex Equality Troubles, 32 William & Mary Bill of Rgst J. 117 (2023)

This article takes up what Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. may mean for sex equality rights beyond the abortion setting. It details how Dobbs lays the foundation for rolling back and even eliminating Fourteenth Amendment sex equality protections. The work scales these possibilities against a different dimension of the ruling that’s yet to receive the attention that it merits. An important footnote in Dobbs, Footnote 22, sketches a new history-and-tradition-based approach to unenumerated rights under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. The jurisprudence that this Footnote capacitates could transform the constitutional landscape via new economic and social rights that set the Court on a collision course with the Slaughter-House Cases. Dangers on the economic rights front include reviving Lochner and its political economic principles in new constitutional garb. Dangers on the social rights front, by contrast, include new constitutional family law rules written from the social-conservative right, overriding constitutional and positive law developments that, since the 1960s, have broadly managed family law from and toward the liberal to progressive left. In both these areas, the Court’s decisions would be capable of catching various sex equality protections in their snares. The future in relation to all these prospects may be set by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the swing-vote justice in Dobbs. So, this article attends to the determinants of Kavanaugh’s Dobbs concurrence, and thus Dobbs’ meaning. While matters could obviously get much worse for sex equality rights after Dobbs, Kavanaugh’s concurrence also offers some reason to hope that they won’t. Struggles for sex equality rights may be intensifying and entering distinctively perilous times. Their future, however, has yet to be determined, including by the Supreme Court

SCOTUS Grants Cert in Case of Idaho Abortion Ban and Federal Requirement of Emergency Room Procedures

Wash Post, Supreme Court to Decide if U.S. law Requires Some Emergency Room Abortions

The Supreme Court said Friday it will review a case challenging Idaho’s strict abortion ban, which the Biden administration says conflicts with a federal law requiring emergency room doctors to perform the procedure in some circumstances.

Idaho’s attorney general asked the justices to intervene after a lower-court judge blocked a section of Idaho’s abortion statute targeting doctors. The judge said the provision violates a federal law that requires hospitals receiving Medicare funding to guarantee emergency care. In its brief order Friday, the justices allowed the Idaho law to take full effect for now and said they would review the matter on an expedited basis in April.

The Biden administration turned to the Medicare law as a narrow way to challenge state-level abortion bans in federal court after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned the fundamental right to an abortion established decades earlier in Roe v. Wade. The effort was seen as one of the few paths the administration could pursue to preserve access to abortion, which remains a galvanizing and divisive issue across the country in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.

Reviewing Clarke's Sex Discrimination Formalism

Leah Litman, Toggle Boggle, JOTWELL, reviewing Jessica A. Clarke, Sex Discrimination Formalism, __ Va. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2023), available on SSRN (Aug. 13, 2023).

What is sex discrimination? Or, more generally, what is discrimination?

This question has often centered around a few recurring divisions in constitutional and antidiscrimination law. One division is between intentional discrimination and disparate impact theories of liability; another break is between formal equality and substantive equality; another, related divide is between anti-classification theories of equality and anti-subordination theories.

In her timely new article, Sex Discrimination Formalism, Professor Jessica Clarke smartly unpacks the category of “formal equality” and shows that, at different points, it encompasses a family of different theories that sometimes travel together, but not always. Clarke argues that courts applying “formal” approaches to equality are sometimes using “but for” causation, asking whether some protected trait or characteristic is the but-for cause of differential treatment. But courts adopting a “formal” approach to equality sometimes use “anti-classification” theories of equality, asking if a protected trait or characteristic has been used to categorize or sort individuals. Finally, courts might use a “similarly situated” test that examines whether someone has been treated differently than someone who is “similarly situated” to them (but who does not have a particular trait or characteristic).

Clarke points out that Bostock v. Clayton County blended all of these different approaches as it engaged in a formal approach to Title VII. (In Bostock, the Court held that Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination because of sex entailed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.) That is, Bostock could plausibly maintain that all of the three theories pointed toward the same conclusion. But there are times when the different approaches might yield different results. For pregnancy discrimination, some courts have concluded that sex is a but-for cause of the discrimination. But courts applying a “similarly situated” or “anti-classification” test have rejected arguments that pregnancy discrimination is a kind of sex discrimination.

These differences are not just academic. They help clarify some of what is happening in recent decisions

How the Supreme Court's History and Tradition Test Threatens Women's Rights and Safety

Melissa Murray & Kate Shaw, The Conservative Supreme Court Vision That Means Inequality for Women

But even if the court upholds the challenged law, it seems unlikely that it will address the broader issue at the heart of this case: whether and how a long-distant past constrains present-day policymakers, and particularly the impact of such an interpretive approach on women.

The court made clear its commitment to a history-and-tradition-bound method of constitutional interpretation in June 2022 when it announced its decisions in the gun-regulation case New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen as well as in the case that overruled Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.***

The requirement that present-day gun laws resemble gun laws of the distant past prioritizes history and tradition in much the same way the Dobbs court looked to the historic regulation of abortion, pregnancy and birth to support the view that the Constitution did not protect a right to abortion.

In this regard, Rahimi is not only a sequel to Bruen, but also a sequel to Dobbs. Rahimi has little to do with abortion rights, but as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar noted in her stirring defense of the gun law on Tuesday, the court’s decision will have real consequences for women’s safety, as well as the safety of police officers who respond to domestic violence calls and the broader public. The court may seem poised to uphold the law, but the conservative justices did not appear interested in revisiting the history-and-tradition test announced in Bruen.

Only Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared openly skeptical of the test. In one remarkable back-and-forth with attorneys for both sides, Justice Jackson, who was not a member of the court when Bruen and Dobbs were decided, said that she was “trying to understand if there’s a flaw in the history-and-traditions kind of framework to the extent that when we’re looking at history and tradition, we’re not considering the history and tradition of all of the people but only some of the people.”

The Implications of Dobbs to the Fundamental Rights of Family Privacy

Rona Kaufman Kitchen, Privacy: Pre- and Post-Dobbs, 61 Duquesne U. L. Rev. (2023)  

The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to include a fundamental right to familial privacy. The exact contours of that right were developed by the Court from 1923 until 2015. In 2022, with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court abruptly changed course and held that the right to terminate a pregnancy is no longer part of the right to privacy previously recognized by the Court. This essay seeks to place Dobbs in the context of the Court’s family privacy cases in an effort to understand the Court’s reasoning and the impact the decision may have in the future.