Melissa Murray. Harvard Law Review. Volume 134, Issue 1. November 2020.
Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent…
— Then-Judge John G. Roberts, Jr.
[Stare decisis is] important because it reflect[s] the view that courts should respect the judgments and the wisdom that are embodied in prior judicial decisions.
— Then-Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Introduction
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly described himself as “pro-life” and vowed, if elected, to appoint Supreme court Justices who would be reliable votes to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that expanded on prior interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment to conclude that the right to privacy was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
When President Trump put forth two nominees to the United States Supreme Court, then-Judge Gorsuch and then-Judge Kavanaugh, the confirmation proceedings unsurprisingly unfolded in the shadow of the President’s pro-life promises. As has been the recent practice for nominees to the Court, both then-Judge Gorsuch and then-Judge Kavanaugh avoided providing specific views about abortion rights and instead “made the customary noises” about stare decisis and respect for settled precedent. Although neither nominee specifically stated his views about the continued longevity of Roe v. Wade, discussion of respect for precedent and stare decisis has become a stand-in for a more fraught conversation about the future of abortion rights.
Latin for “to stand by what has been decided,” stare decisis is a cornerstone of the Anglo-American legal tradition. By its terms, stare decisis demands that lower courts follow the decisions of superior courts and that the United States Supreme Court defer to past decisions on the same, or similar, issues. And while a court may overturn its own precedent, the demands of stare decisis suggest that such a step should be taken only if strong reasons exist for doing so.
For the last fifty years, the debate over what it means to observe the strictures of stare decisis and follow precedent has centered largely around a single decision: Roe v. Wade. Not only is every Supreme Court nominee quizzed about her views on the role of precedent in decisionmaking and, indirectly, the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade, but each abortion case that comes before the Court is also framed in the context of whether it will provide the Court with the opportunity to overrule or uphold Roe.
In this regard, stare decisis is the alpha and the omega of the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence. Because of stare decisis, Justices, regardless of their views as to whether Roe was correctly decided or properly reasoned, have been reluctant to jettison entirely the 1973 decision. And yet, the Court’s failure to formally overrule Roe has cemented the decision’s position as a precedent, legitimizing the abortion right to the dismay of abortion opponents. On this account, stare decisis is both the reason why Roe cannot be overturned and the reason why it must be.
But it is not simply that stare decisis principles are the alpha and the omega that shape the Court’s approach to abortion; it is also that the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, in turn, informs its approach to stare decisis. That is, conflicts over the scope and substance of the abortion right have shaped our understanding of what is precedential and what it means to follow precedent. Indeed, it has been in the context of the Court’s abortion jurisprudence itself that the Justices have sought to delineate when—and how—they adhere to, or depart from, past precedents. In this regard, the relationship between stare decisis and the law of abortion is not confined to disputes over the constitutionality of a particular abortion restriction or even whether the Constitution recognizes a fundamental right to choose an abortion. Instead, the relationship between the two informs every dispute in which the Court considers whether and how to defer to its past decisions.
The relationship between stare decisis and the Court’s abortion jurisprudence is evident in the Court’s disposition of June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo, a challenge to Louisiana’s Act 620, which required physicians providing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Although the Court voted 5-4 to invalidate the challenged law, the Justices were fractured in their reasoning and the guidance they provided to lower courts judging future abortion restrictions. Indeed, one of the few points of agreement among all nine Justices was that principles of stare decisis dictated the outcome in the instant case.
It is perhaps unsurprising that all of the opinions in June Medical Services focused heavily on stare decisis and fidelity to precedent. After all, the case bore striking similarities to Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a challenge to a virtually identical Texas admitting privileges law that the Court decided only four years earlier. But it was not just that, as a settled precedent squarely on point, Whole Woman’s Health obviously should have dictated the outcome in June Medical Services. Stare decisis dominated the Court’s disposition of June Medical Services in the same way that it has come to dominate almost every case that implicates the constitutional right to abortion.
Using June Medical Services as a point of entry, this Comment surfaces and examines the complicated and constitutive relationship between the Court’s approach to stare decisis and its abortion-related jurisprudence. This Comment proceeds in four parts. Part I considers the relationship between stare decisis and the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. Focusing specifically on Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Gonzales v. Carhart, it argues that stare decisis and precedent have come to shape the public conflict over abortion rights and, more particularly, the Court’s efforts to resolve that conflict in its jurisprudence.
Part II turns to June Medical Services v. Russo to elaborate the relationship between stare decisis and the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. Specifically, it focuses on Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence to show that the dynamics identified in Casey and Gonzales are not isolated, but rather are part and parcel of the Court’s efforts to delineate the scope and substance of the abortion right. As this Part explains, the Chief Justice’s concurrence wrestled with the question of what it means to be faithful to past precedent. While the Chief Justice acknowledged that, under principles of stare decisis, Whole Woman’s Health, the Court’s most recent abortion decision, controlled, he was nonetheless selective about which aspects of the 2016 decision demanded deference. This selective approach to stare decisis transformed the meaning—and precedential value—of Whole Woman’s Health, as well as the standards by which abortion restrictions will be judged going forward.
Part III argues that even as stare decisis has shaped the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, the doctrine has in turn been shaped by the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. To elaborate this claim, this Part first explains how Casey has informed much of the Court’s jurisprudence on stare decisis. Relatedly, it shows how the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has served as both a blueprint and a roadmap for dealing with precedent in nonabortion contexts. More provocatively, this Part argues that Roe and the abortion right shadow all of the Court’s efforts to define and observe the requirements of stare decisis. Part IV considers the normative implications of the abortion jurisprudence’s influence on the Court’s approach to precedent. The Comment then briefly concludes.
Stare Decisis and Abortion
Concerns about stare decisis have long shaped the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. In Roe v. Wade, the Court recognized a constitutional right to choose an abortion. In the half century that has followed, the Court has faced a series of abortion-related legal challenges, many of which have presented the question of whether Roe was properly decided. In these disputes, in particular, stare decisis has shaped the Court’s disposition of the cases. For example, throughout the 1980s, the Court entertained a series of cases that implicated Roe or openly challenged it. Although some members of the Court insisted that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled, a majority of the Court, nodding to stare decisis, avoided overruling a decision so recently rendered. To do so, one Justice fretted, would undermine the predictability and legitimacy of the Court’s pronouncements.
By 1992, a new challenge, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, seemed poised to overrule Roe. In a surprising turn, however, the Casey Court declined to do so. Guided by “principles of institutional integrity, and the rule of stare decisis,” the Court instead reaffirmed Roe’s “essential holding” that there is an individual right to terminate a pregnancy.
Because it explicitly declined to overrule Roe, Casey is widely credited with “saving” the 1973 decision. But even as the Casey plurality professed fidelity to stare decisis and rejected claims that Roe was improperly reasoned, it did not leave Roe intact. The Casey joint opinion abandoned Roe’s trimester framework, decrying its “elaborate but rigid construct” as “unnecessary” and, more troublingly, an undue limit on “the State’s permissible exercise of its powers.” The Casey plurality also abandoned strict scrutiny as the appropriate standard of review for abortion regulations, in favor of the more permissive “undue burden” standard. The profundity of Casey’s alterations did not go unnoticed. As Chief Justice Rehnquist archly observed in dissent, the joint opinion “retains the outer shell of Roe v. Wade but beats a wholesale retreat from the substance of that case.”
In deference to stare decisis, Casey declined to explicitly overrule Roe v. Wade. But in truth, Casey’s fidelity to Roe was selective—the joint opinion deferred to certain aspects of Roe, while abandoning others. And in so doing, Casey dramatically altered the abortion landscape, allowing states broader authority to slowly strangle access to abortion via a steady stream of restrictions and regulations. On this account, declining to overrule Roe was a mere formality. In practical effect, by authorizing states to legislate abortion rights out of existence, Casey overruled much of Roe’s substance, substantially curtailing access to abortion for most women.
But if Casey effectively overruled Roe, it also made clear why, for some, actually overruling the 1973 decision remained urgent and necessary. For abortion opponents, it was not enough to gut Roe and sharply limit abortion access. Casey’s failure to formally overrule Roe left the 1973 decision standing as a precedent—and in so doing, further entrenched the view that the Constitution recognizes and protects a right to choose an abortion. In this regard, for abortion opponents, Casey was both a practical victory and an incalculable loss. In a legal tradition where respect for precedent looms large, functional victories are hollow and inadequate. Stare decisis does not simply demand respect for precedent as settled law; “by giving the veneer of respectability” to the underlying precedent, it fuels the view that the precedent is properly reasoned and correct.
With this dynamic in mind, it is no surprise that when disputes over abortion rights come before the Court, they often turn on whether and how to apply extant precedent—and more particularly, whether and how to protect Roe and other precedents recognizing a right to abortion. Gonzales v. Carhart is illustrative of this dynamic. There, the Court took up a challenge to the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 (PBABA), which prohibited the performance of certain second-trimester abortions. Critically, in enacting the challenged law, Congress explicitly understood itself to be testing the limits of precedent and stare decisis. Just three years earlier, the Court, in Stenberg v. Carhart, struck down a similar Nebraska statute partly because the law lacked a health exception that would allow the use of the prohibited abortion method where necessary to preserve the woman’s health. In enacting the federal ban, Congress deliberately excluded a health exception, thus provoking a direct challenge to the Court’s precedents.
In Gonzales, a narrow 5-4 majority rejected two facial challenges to the PBABA and, in so doing, all but ignored the 2000 decision in Stenberg and instead offered a narrow reading of Casey. Writing for a majority that included Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, Justice Kennedy distinguished the facts of Stenberg from those in Gonzales, thereby diminishing Stenberg’s relevance to the Court’s determinations. And though he “assume[d]” that Casey controlled, Justice Kennedy explicitly noted that the Casey joint opinion “did not find support from all those who join the instant opinion.” Instead, Justice Kennedy and his fragile majority focused narrowly on one aspect of Casey—the joint opinion’s conclusion that “the government has a legitimate and substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life.” This premise, which Justice Kennedy deemed “central” to the joint opinion’s holding, “would be repudiated” were the Court to invalidate the PBABA. To this end, in considering the challenged statute, Justice Kennedy asserted that the federal abortion ban could be justified in part as reflecting the government’s interest in protecting women from the regret and emotional consequences they may suffer in the wake of choosing an abortion.
As with Casey, Gonzales underscores the degree to which concerns about stare decisis and, particularly, deference to Roe have shadowed and shaped the Court’s abortion jurisprudence. The Gonzales majority pantomimed respect for precedent by “assum[ing]” that Casey controlled. At the same time, however, it went to broad lengths to distinguish —and neuter—Stenberg’s precedential impact, while reducing Casey to a narrow endorsement of the state’s interest in protecting fetal life. But even as the majority’s disposition of Gonzales focused on the weight of Stenberg and Casey, its efforts to narrow the scope of these applicable precedents obviously implicated Roe—a point that Justice Ginsburg raised in a vigorous dissent.
Writing on behalf of herself and Justices Stevens, Souter, and Breyer, Justice Ginsburg made clear that the majority’s casual regard for precedent had broad implications for Roe and the abortion right. Despite its nod to stare decisis, the majority’s decision was, in Justice Ginsburg’s view, an “alarming” “effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court.” Not only did the decision “refuse[] to take Casey and Stenberg seriously,” “blur[ring] the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between previability and postviability abortions,” but the Court also had, “for the first time since Roe, …blesse[d] a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.” And perhaps most troubling of all, the majority’s uncritical acceptance of the narrative of “abortion regret” reflected its prioritization of what Justice Ginsburg termed “an antiabortion shibboleth” over medical evidence, creating an “undisguised conflict with Stenberg.”
Justice Ginsburg’s point was clear. Although the majority in Gonzales did not confront Roe directly, as the Casey plurality had done, it nonetheless did not miss an opportunity to reflect upon—and revisit—the question of whether Roe was properly decided. And to the extent that stare decisis limited the majority’s predisposition to cast Roe as a constitutional impropriety, Casey furnished the template for achieving a similar practical result. In lieu of explicitly overruling an abortion precedent, the Court could simply distinguish or narrow past decisions, entirely undermining their force and scope.
And even in cases like Gonzales, where there was no direct conflict with Roe, the strategy of nodding to precedent, while simultaneously limiting it, could also incrementally lay a foundation for eventually overruling Roe and reimagining a more cabined understanding of abortion rights. In this regard, every abortion challenge—from Casey forward—is both a test of the Court’s commitment to its precedents and a fresh opportunity to utterly reimagine those precedents. And all of this ineluctably points to Roe. At bottom, the perfunctory performance of stare decisis in which the Court engages in every abortion challenge is one that leads inexorably to a single, preordained outcome—a final confrontation with Roe and the vexed question of whether the Court will overrule its most controversial decision.
Accordingly, every abortion-related challenge that the Court faces is a test of the Court’s commitment to stare decisis and, indirectly, its stomach for preserving Roe. And this dynamic can be glimpsed in the Court’s most recent foray into the abortion debate: June Medical Services.
June Medical Services v. Russo
From the start, June Medical Services v. Russo raised questions of stare decisis. The case involved a challenge to Louisiana’s Act 620, a 2014 law that required physicians providing abortions to secure admitting privileges at a local hospital. That June Medical Services was even before the U.S. Supreme Court raised eyebrows. Just three years earlier, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court struck down, in a 5-3 decision, a virtually identical Texas admitting privileges law. As the Court in that case explained, under the undue burden standard announced in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, an abortion restriction could be upheld only if it did not have the “purpose or effect” of “plac[ing] a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking” a previability abortion. To determine whether an abortion restriction was a substantial obstacle, courts were required to “consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits those laws confer.”
These instructions were intended both to clarify casey’s amorphous “substantial obstacle” language and to inject more rigor into the calculus in the wake of Gonzales. On this logic, courts could not simply decide what obstacles were so substantial as to be impermissible and what obstacles fell within constitutional limits. Instead, lower courts were obliged to weigh the benefits that the state hoped to achieve through the legislation against the burdens that the legislation imposed. If the burdens exceeded the likely benefits, then the challenged law posed a substantial obstacle under Casey.
Relying on Whole Woman’s Health, a Louisiana federal district court weighed the purported benefits against the burdens imposed and found that, if permitted to go into effect, Act 620 would leave Louisiana with only one physician available to perform abortions in the early stages of pregnancy and none available to perform abortions between seventeen and twenty-one weeks of pregnancy. Although the state claimed that the law was intended to ensure that physicians providing abortions had proper credentials, thereby protecting women’s health, the court concluded that the burden on abortion access grossly outweighed the limited benefits that the challenged law achieved. Accordingly, the district court enjoined Louisiana from implementing the admitting privileges requirement on the ground that it unconstitutionally imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, however, reversed that ruling. The court conceded that it was “bound to apply [Whole Woman’s Health]” and weigh the benefits of Act 620 against the burdens imposed, but it maintained that “the facts in the instant case are remarkably different” from Whole Woman’s Health. According to the court, “[u]nlike Texas, Louisiana presents some evidence of a minimal benefit” and “far more detailed evidence of Act 620’s impact on access to abortion.” “In light of the more developed record,” the Fifth Circuit then purported to weigh the benefits and burdens and concluded that “[i]n contrast to Texas’s H.B. 2, Louisiana’s Act 620 does not impose a substantial burden on a large fraction of women,” thus allowing the state to enforce the challenged provision. The full Fifth Circuit, in a 9-6 vote, denied a rehearing en banc. In October 2019, the Supreme Court granted the challengers’ petition for certiorari, as well as the state’s related petition for review.
That the Court granted review in June Medical Services was perhaps surprising, given that it had considered the constitutionality of an almost identical statute only a few years earlier. For some, the fact that four votes could be mustered to grant certiorari under these unusual circumstances suggested that one wing of the Court was especially eager to revisit the question of abortion rights. Regardless of who had voted to grant certiorari, the mere fact of Court review was “likely to yield an unusually telling decision, reshaping the constitutional principles governing abortion rights.”
On review, the Court considered whether the challenged admitting privileges law was an undue burden on the abortion right. Writing for himself and Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Justice Breyer, the author of Whole Woman’s Health, applied “the constitutional standards set forth in our earlier abortion-related cases, and in particular in Casey and Whole Woman’s Health.” As the plurality observed, “a statute which, while furthering [a] valid state interest has the effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman’s choice cannot be considered a permissible means of serving its legitimate ends.” On this logic, the plurality maintained that “‘[u]nnecessary health regulations’ impose an unconstitutional ‘undue burden’ if they have ‘the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion.'” In determining whether a challenged abortion re striction constitutes a substantial obstacle, “courts must ‘consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits those laws confer.'” Such an inquiry requires courts to review legislative factfinding “under a deferential standard,” but, as the plurality made clear, deference does not mean an abdication of the judicial role. Instead, the plurality cautioned, “the courts ‘retai[n] an independent constitutional duty to review factual findings where constitutional rights are at stake.'”
In view of Casey and Whole Woman’s Health, Justice Breyer then carefully weighed the purported benefits of Act 620 against the burdens that its enforcement would entail, concluding that the district court’s determination that Act 620 “would place substantial obstacles in the path of women seeking an abortion in Louisiana” while providing “no significant health benefits” was not “clearly erroneous.” In “pos[ing] a ‘substantial obstacle’ to women seeking an abortion,” the plurality concluded, the challenged law “violate[d] the Constitution.”
Although Chief Justice Roberts joined in the Court’s judgment invalidating the Louisiana admitting privileges law, he did not join the plurality opinion, choosing instead to write separately. And although he wrote only for himself, Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence carries particular weight. As the narrowest opinion supporting the judgment, Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence will be regarded as the controlling opinion.
And while Chief Justice Roberts joined in the judgment, his concurrence was meaningfully different from the plurality opinion. Almost immediately, the Chief Justice made clear that, even as he joined the plurality to strike down the Louisiana law, his misgivings about abortion rights had not abated—he specifically noted that he “joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue[d] to believe that the case was wrongly decided.” But despite his skepticism of abortion rights more generally, and Whole Woman’s Health in particular, other values counseled in favor of invalidating Act 620. As Chief Justice Roberts explained, “[t]he legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike.” Because the Louisiana law imposed “as severe” a burden on abortion access as did the Texas law invalidated in Whole Woman’s Health, the Chief Justice concluded that it “cannot stand under our precedents.”
On this account, it would seem that stare decisis carried the day, leading a most recalcitrant Chief Justice to a decision that he otherwise would have avoided. But even as Chief Justice Roberts extolled the virtues of stare decisis—promoting “reliance on judicial decisions,” the “evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles,” and the legitimacy of the judicial process—he also acknowledged its limits. Stare decisis is not simply “a mechanical formula of adherence to the latest decision.” To the contrary, “[s]tare decisis principles …determine how we handle a decision that itself departed from the cases that came before it.”
On this point, the Chief Justice’s antipathy for Whole Woman’s Health—and the precariousness of his commitment to stare decisis—came into sharp focus. If fidelity to precedent demanded his vote to invalidate Act 620, it also demanded interrogating whether Whole Woman’s Health, the Court’s most recent abortion decision, had been faithful to the Court’s earlier abortion decisions, particularly Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
According to Chief Justice Roberts, although the majority in Whole Woman’s Health “faithfully recit[ed]” Casey’s substantial obstacle standard, the decision to invalidate the Texas admitting privileges law also had gone beyond Casey to “require[] that courts consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits those laws confer.” But “[n]othing about Casey suggested that a weighing of costs and benefits of an abortion regulation was a job for the courts.” As Chief Justice Roberts explained, if Casey required any consideration of the benefits of an abortion regulation, it was only in establishing the “threshold requirement that the State have a ‘legitimate purpose’ and that the law be ‘reasonably related to that goal.'”
On this telling, Whole Woman’s Health was precedential only to the extent that it reiterated Casey’s substantial obstacle standard. By contrast, its directive to reviewing courts to weigh the benefits of an abortion regulation against its burdens was, in Chief Justice Roberts’s view, a distortion of Casey’s logic and holding. Accordingly, if stare decisis dictated the outcome in June Medical Services, the precedent to be followed was not the full decision in Whole Woman’s Health, as the plurality maintained, but rather only those aspects of Whole Woman’s Health that reiterated the more limited standard first identified in Casey.
To underscore the point that fidelity to precedent demanded only consideration of substantial obstacles, rather than the weighing of benefits and burdens, Chief Justice Roberts cataloged the restrictions challenged in Casey, all but one of which were upheld on the ground that they did not pose a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion. More importantly, in reviewing the challenged restrictions, Chief Justice Roberts noted that the Casey plurality considered only “whether there was a substantial burden, not whether benefits outweighed burdens,” including in its consideration of a twenty-four-hour waiting period that the lower court found “did ‘not further the state interest in maternal health.'” As a result, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that “[t]he upshot of Casey is clear: The several restrictions that did not impose a substantial obstacle were constitutional, while the restriction that did impose a substantial obstacle was unconstitutional.”
Having clarified that Whole Woman’s Health was controlling precedent only insofar as it affirmed the substantial obstacle standard announced in Casey—and rejecting any benefits-burdens balancing test as beyond the scope of Casey—the Chief Justice turned to whether Act 620 was an unconstitutional substantial obstacle. Noting the district court’s findings “that the Louisiana law would ‘result in a drastic reduction in the number and geographic distribution of abortion providers'” and “longer waiting times for appointments, increased crowding and increased associated health risk,” the Chief Justice thus concluded the challenged law was an unconstitutional substantial obstacle.
In many ways, Chief Justice Roberts’s approach to precedent recalls Justice Scalia’s partial concurrence in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a pre-Casey challenge to abortion funding restrictions in which the Court declined to explicitly overrule Roe v. Wade. There, Justice Scalia outlined the four options before the Court when it confronted past precedent—”to reaffirm [the precedent], to overrule it explicitly, to overrule it sub silentio, or to avoid the question.” According to Justice Scalia, the Webster Court took the “least responsible” path, avoiding the question of Roe entirely. By contrast, in June Medical Services, Chief Justice Roberts took a dual-pronged approach —reaffirming Whole Woman’s Health for the purpose of distinguishing it and, in the process, implicitly overruling it.
Therein lies the irony of Chief Justice Roberts’s approach to precedent in June Medical Services. Chief Justice Roberts invoked stare decisis as a means of ensuring judicial modesty and restraint, noting that “[a]dherence to precedent is necessary to ‘avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts.'” Yet in the name of stare decisis and restraint, Chief Justice Roberts at once adhered to Whole Woman’s Health and simultaneously denounced the decision as a departure from past precedent (Casey). In this way, Chief Justice Roberts’s respect for precedent depended entirely on identifying those aspects of past decisions that he wished to follow and those that he did not. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts’s version of stare decisis was so selective that one of the June Medical Services dissenters was compelled to name it. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Alito noted that, even as the Chief Justice “stresses the importance of stare decisis … he votes to overrule Whole Woman’s Health insofar as it changed the Casey test.”
But the issue is not simply that Chief Justice Roberts believes that Casey alone prescribes the appropriate standard for judging abortion restrictions; it is that in following only those aspects of Whole Woman’s Health that, in his view, cohere with Casey, Chief Justice Roberts transformed the meaning of Whole Woman’s Health—and indeed, what it means to “follow” precedent. In a separate dissent, Justice Gorsuch noted precisely these incongruities in Chief Justice Roberts’s position. As Justice Gorsuch explained, though Chief Justice Roberts insisted that he was following Whole Woman’s Health, Chief Justice Roberts’s claims to respect precedent were wholly unfounded in light of his rejection of the benefits-burdens balancing test. As Justice Gorsuch archly underscored, “whatever else respect for stare decisis might suggest, it cannot demand allegiance to a nonexistent ruling inconsistent with the approach actually taken by the Court.”
Taken together, the dissents by Justices Alito and Gorsuch took a dim view of Chief Justice Roberts’s approach to stare decisis. Both dissents argued that Chief Justice Roberts’s characterization of Whole Woman’s Health was a legal fiction—a remade ruling utterly inconsistent with the actual holding in Whole Woman’s Health. And they were correct. Although Chief Justice Roberts professed allegiance to stare decisis, in fact, the vision of Whole Woman’s Health that he viewed as controlling bears little resemblance to the 2016 decision. In Chief Justice Roberts’s recasting, Whole Woman’s Health became the legal version of Dorian Gray’s portrait—aging backwards until it was recognizable only as a rerendering of Casey.
This is all to say that, in June Medical Services, allegiance to stare decisis yielded a strikingly discordant outcome. In the name of preserving and following precedent, Chief Justice Roberts purported to maintain Whole Woman’s Health but utterly transformed the case’s meaning. When all was said and done, Whole Woman’s Health, which was once heralded as providing robust protections for abortion rights, was left desiccated—a point that did not go unnoticed by other members of the June Medical Services Court. Surveying the jurisprudential landscape, dissenting Justice Kavanaugh observed that “[t]oday, five Members of the Court reject the Whole Woman’s Health cost-benefit standard.” In this regard, Chief Justice Roberts’s efforts to follow precedent led, curiously, to a result in which the conservative wing of the Court rejected the substance of Whole Woman’s Health, even as a shell of the decision stands as an “homage” to stare decisis. That is, Chief Justice Roberts’s defense of stare decisis was also a departure from it—an effort to preserve precedent while simultaneously transforming it. Going forward, it is the 5-4 rejection of Whole Woman’s Health’s benefits-burdens balancing test that will stand as the precedent that June Medical Services established.
Taken alongside Casey, Gonzales, and Whole Woman’s Health, June Medical Services exemplifies the Court’s approach to stare decisis in the hothouse climate of abortion rights. In this politically pitched context, the Court has developed an approach to precedent that at once has generated important, and often incremental, doctrinal changes and simultaneously preserved the appearance of fealty to its past decisions. In these cases, the Court has distinguished and cabined earlier decisions, forging a line of jurisprudence that entrenches the abortion right while sharply limiting its scope.
In this way, stare decisis has profoundly shaped the Court’s approach to abortion. But this is only part of the story. If stare decisis has shaped the law of abortion, it has also, in turn, been shaped by the law of abortion. As the following Part examines, the Court’s ongoing struggle over abortion rights has inexorably influenced our understanding of what it means to follow and be faithful to precedent.
Abortion and Stare Decisis
As the previous Part demonstrates, questions of stare decisis and precedent shadow the Court’s disposition of almost every abortion case. While this insight is important, it illuminates only one facet of the symbiotic relationship between abortion and stare decisis. Less obviously, the Court’s efforts to grapple with abortion have, in turn, shaped its approach to stare decisis.
This Part develops this claim in three ways. First, it focuses on Planned Parenthood v. Casey to show how this “precedent on precedent” has shaped not only the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, but also its jurisprudence on stare decisis. It then pivots from a granular discussion of cases to consider how the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has provided a blueprint of interpretive moves that the Court has deployed in other contexts in which it has interpreted precedent. Finally, this Part makes clear that while cases from across the doctrinal spectrum may present questions of stare decisis, the Court’s efforts to consider and apply precedent always occur in the shadow of Roe v. Wade and the abortion right. Put differently, Roe and the abortion right function as a gnomon, the central pillar of a sundial, casting shadows across the Court’s encounters with stare decisis, even in nonabortion contexts.
Abortion as “Precedent on Precedent”
In decisions in which the Court confronts questions of stare decisis, it often adverts to its prior opinions identifying whether and how it will regard its past precedents. Not surprisingly, chief among these “precedents on precedent” is Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In Casey, a plurality of the Court not only salvaged (and sandbagged) Roe v. Wade, but also identified a series of factors designed to “gauge the respective costs of reaffirming and overruling a prior case.” Under Casey’s logic, when contemplating a departure from extant precedent, courts should consider:
[(i)] whether the rule has proven to be intolerable simply in defying practical workability; [(2)] whether the rule is subject to a kind of reliance that would lend a special hardship to the consequences of overruling and add inequity to the cost of repudiation; [(3)] whether related principles of law have so far developed as to have left the old rule no more than a remnant of abandoned doctrine; or [(4)] whether facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have robbed the old rule of significant application or justification.
Critically, Casey’s factors have not only guided the Court in its review of subsequent abortion cases, like Gonzales and June Medical Services, but also explicitly informed the Court’s understanding of stare decisis in nonabortion contexts. For example, in Lawrence v. Texas, a challenge to a criminal prohibition on same-sex sodomy, the Court confronted Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 decision upholding a similar sodomy prohibition. In overruling Bowers, the Lawrence majority explicitly weighed the Casey factors, concluding that Bowers had not engendered “individual or societal reliance” and had “cause[d] uncertainty, for the precedents before and after its issuance contradict its central holding.”
Likewise, in Agostini v. Felton, where the Court overruled an Establishment Clause precedent decided just twelve years earlier, it referenced Casey for the proposition that “stare decisis does not prevent us from overruling a previous decision where there has been a significant change in, or subsequent development of, our constitutional law.” And in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, a challenge to a federal affirmative action program, even as a plurality of the Court concluded that there was “special justification” that warranted overruling an earlier decision, it was at pains to distinguish the factual circumstances from those in Casey, where, in the context of a similarly divisive issue, the Court declined to overrule an earlier precedent. The mere fact that two members of the narrow Adarand majority felt compelled to distinguish their decision from Casey speaks to Casey’s status as a critical “precedent on precedent”—both in and outside of the abortion context.
In this vein, it is unsurprising that those who disagree with a departure from precedent often root their disagreement in Casey’s logic. In Citizens United v. FEC, for example, Justice Stevens objected to the majority’s decision to depart from established campaign finance precedents, citing Casey for the proposition that “[a] decision to overrule should rest on some special reason over and above the belief that a prior case was wrongly decided.” Likewise, in his bitter dissent in
Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Scalia cataloged the myriad ways that the majority opinion was inconsistent with Casey. As importantly, he argued that if, by the majority’s reasoning, Bowers was an unstable precedent, then so too was Roe. Justice Scalia suggested that, rather than faithfully applying Casey’s factors, the majority had “revise[d]” the stare decisis calculus to suit its predisposition toward jettisoning Bowers. In so doing, the majority, Justice Scalia crowed, had “exposed Casey’s extraordinary deference to precedent for the result-oriented expedient that it is.”
In this regard, Casey not only has formed the core of the Court’s post-Roe abortion jurisprudence, but also has come to serve as a pillar of its stare decisis jurisprudence. In its detailed consideration of whether and under what circumstances to overrule or retain Roe, Casey has informed the Court’s subsequent discussions about stare decisis and precedent.
Abortion as Blueprint
Casey’s imprint is evident on the face of the Court’s stare decisis jurisprudence. Less obvious is the influence of the Court’s abortion jurisprudence on the ways that the Court applies stare decisis principles in its treatment of precedent. As this section explains, the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has also, more subtly, offered a blueprint for narrowing, limiting, and eventually overturning earlier precedents. And meaningfully, this blueprint for gradually eroding precedent has surfaced even in circumstances where the Court is not considering abortion or even explicitly adverting to its abortion jurisprudence.
Payne v. Tennessee, a 1991 challenge to the admissibility of victim impact statements, is instructive. There, a 6-3 majority of the Court overruled two prior decisions that prescribed a per se rule prohibiting the admission of victim impact statements in the penalty phase of a capital trial. In overruling the two earlier precedents, Booth v. Maryland and South Carolina v. Gathers, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who authored the majority opinion, conceded that “[s]tare decisis is the preferred course.” Nevertheless, he noted that “when governing decisions are unworkable or are badly reasoned, ‘this Court has never felt constrained to follow precedent.'” On this account, the per se rule against the admission of victim impact statements “defied consistent application by the lower courts” and neglected criminal sentencing’s concern for the injuries to the victim and society. And more troublingly, it diminished the states’ “traditional latitude to prescribe the method by which those who commit murder shall be punished.” The Court’s disposition in Payne recalled its treatment of Roe’s trimester framework in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc., Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a trio of abortion cases decided in the 1980s. In those cases, members of the Court denounced the trimester framework first articulated in Roe as “outmoded,” unduly “rigid,” and “on a collision course with itself.” In a series of moves that the Payne Court would later apply in the context of capital sentencing, those skeptical of the trimester framework emphasized its incoherence with both obstetric practice and the states’ traditional police powers. In this way, the Payne Court’s concern that the per se rule against victim impact statements was impractical and inconsistent recalled the Court’s earlier efforts to limit Roe’s force.
Payne evinced an effort to translate interpretive moves used in the abortion context to other contested doctrinal arenas. But Payne is not alone in this regard. Take, for example, the Court’s decision this Term in Ramos v. Louisiana, where it considered whether the Sixth Amendment required that guilty verdicts for serious crimes be unanimous. 179 180 Central to the Court’s disposition of Ramos was its treatment of an earlier case on the same issue, Apodaca v. Oregon. Decided in 1972 in tandem with Johnson v. Louisiana, Apodaca had fractured the Court, producing together with Johnson “a tangle of seven separate opinions.” By all accounts, the controlling opinion was Justice Powell’s concurrence, which joined the judgment to uphold the Louisiana nonunanimous jury rule, while separately noting that the Sixth Amendment’s unanimous jury requirement applied only to federal trials and was not incorporated against the states.
In Ramos, as in Casey, stare decisis took center stage. Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch gestured to the Casey factors, emphasizing the questionable “quality of [Apodaca’s] reasoning” and its incoherence with Sixth Amendment doctrine. But the issue was not just that Apodaca failed to appreciate the degree to which the expectation of unanimity underlay the Sixth Amendment’s jury right; it was also that the Apodaca Court failed to appreciate the “racist origins” of the Louisiana rule when it rendered its decision in 1972. In this regard, the fact that Louisiana had adopted the nonunanimous jury rule in an effort to “establish the supremacy of the white race” rendered Apodaca not only a Sixth Amendment “outlier,” but also a case decided without due consideration of the challenged rule’s complicated factual and historical context. Thus, the Ramos Court reflected Casey’s caution that new factual considerations could be a basis for reexamining—and discarding—an earlier decision, in order to distinguish, limit, and ultimately overrule it.
Abortion as Roadmap
If abortion jurisprudence has served as a blueprint for reconsidering and overruling unruly precedents, then why have these same strategies proven unsuccessful in dismantling Roe and the abortion right? Despite efforts to challenge and overrule Roe, it has stubbornly survived. And its survival means that any effort to roll back abortion rights will not be accomplished by simply declaring some aspect of Roe unworkable or doctrinally incoherent, as the Court did with other precedents in Payne and Ramos. Instead, a different approach is required.
This section argues that the seeds of the strategy to dismantle Roe have already been sown—in nonabortion cases that, like Payne and Ramos, rely on an interpretation of precedent honed in the abortion context. Where this strategy departs from Payne and Ramos is that it is not simply a “one and done” effort. Indeed, it is a strategy in which distinguishing and limiting precedent is part of an incremental approach that, over time, destabilizes and discredits precedent, laying the foundation for later overruling.
We have yet to see the culmination of this strategy in the context of abortion. But because abortion jurisprudence has strongly influenced the Court’s approach to precedent more generally, we can see its culmination in other doctrinal contexts. Indeed, the template for this longterm strategy for undermining abortion rights can be glimpsed in the arc of a series of decisions considering the constitutionality of union shop fees.
In 1977, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, upholding the constitutionality of agency shop fees for members of a public sector union. Forty-one years later, in Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31, a 5-4 majority of the Court overruled Abood on the grounds that it was “poorly reasoned,” had “led to practical problems and abuse,” lacked sufficiently justifiable “reliance interests,” and, most troublingly, was “inconsistent with other First Amendment cases and ha[d] been undermined by more recent decisions.” Critically, when Abood was litigated, the Court explicitly considered whether the imposition of union shop fees violated the First Amendment rights of nonunion public employees and unanimously concluded it did not. If Abood had proven unworkable and posed such a profound conflict with First Amendment principles, these frailties had surfaced only recently in a series of cases that preceded Janus by just a few years.
For example, in Knox v. SEIU, Local 1000, decided in 2012, the Court began its reconsideration of Abood, noting that it “assumed without any focused analysis” that the First Amendment required only that public sector employees be permitted to opt out of certain union political expenditures. Two years later, in Harris v. Quinn, a majority of the Court distinguished Abood on the ground that it “involved full-fledged public employees.” Yet, even as it found Abood distinguishable and therefore “not controlling,” the Harris majority nonetheless reiterated its concerns that Abood was a First Amendment “anomaly,” whose reasoning was “questionable on several grounds”—some of which “were noted or apparent at or before the time of the decision, but several [of which had] become more evident and troubling in the years since then.” In Friedrichs v. California Teachers Ass’n, the Court was presented with “exhaustive briefing and argument on … whether Abood should be overruled,” but Justice Scalia’s unexpected death left the Court without a full complement of Justices and the Court split evenly on the question. Two years later, a majority of the Court, including a newly appointed Justice Gorsuch, overruled Abood in Janus, explaining that it had for years expressed concern about the 1977 decision.
Taken together, the Knox-Harris-Friedrichs-Janus suite of cases shares important features with the Court’s abortion cases. As an initial matter, the Janus majority’s focus on Abood’s “poor reasoning” and conflict with the First Amendment gestured toward the “prudential and pragmatic considerations” for overruling that Casey prescribed. In the context of public sector unions, the Court redefined notions of “unworkability” and “reliance” so as to destabilize and depart from Abood. And, as others have noted, in both contexts, the changing composition of the Court’s personnel appears to have paved the way for reconsideration of decisions once viewed as well settled.
But beyond the Court’s shifting membership and the shifting understanding of unworkability, the public union cases recall the abortion cases in their instrumental treatment of precedent. As in Casey, where the plurality recognized Roe as precedent while simultaneously stripping it of its substantive content, the Knox majority acknowledged Abood’s controlling weight while simultaneously casting doubt on its coherence with the First Amendment. In Harris, as in Gonzales and June Medical Services, the Court expressed further skepticism of Abood, insisting that doing so was not inconsistent with stare decisis, but rather was part of its broader effort to achieve coherence in First Amendment doctrine. On this account, the majority’s swipes at Abood are framed as efforts to promote doctrinal coherence. That is, they are recast as interpretive moves that serve, rather than detract from, stare decisis and the rule of law.
Recognizing this transformation-through-preservation dynamic helps to make sense of the stubborn incongruity between Janus and June Medical Services. In Janus, as in Ramos, the effort to unsettle earlier precedents ultimately resulted in the Court’s overruling those precedents. By contrast, despite efforts to cabin its force and breadth, Roe has survived. What explains the difference? And does the Chief Justice’s embrace of stare decisis in June Medical Services suggest that Roe and its progeny will continue to withstand future attacks?
With these questions in mind, it is worth noting that the shift from Abood to Janus was neither instantaneous nor serendipitous. Rather, it depended on changes in the Court’s personnel and a long-game strategy of steadily eroding Abood’s foundations. In each case, from Knox to Janus, the Court either subtly distinguished Abood and its ilk or, alternatively, expressed skepticism of Abood’s coherence with the First Amendment. On this account, the majority’s campaign to unsettle Abood was, like the Chief Justice’s treatment of Whole Woman’s Health, one of transformation through preservation. That is, the majority professed fidelity to Abood and maintained the decision in principle, even as it worked assiduously to undermine Abood and gut its substance.
In this regard, the trajectory from Abood to Janus not only mirrors the degree to which the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has informed the way the Court thinks about and treats extant precedents, but also suggests that the effort to subtly revise and reshape precedent glimpsed in cases like June Medical Services may be part of a slow-building and sedimentary strategy aimed at revising and rewriting abortion precedents out of existence. That is, the outcome in Janus not only reflects a blueprint articulated in earlier abortion cases, but also may serve as a roadmap to a future in which the scaffolding of empty precedents that support Roe and its progeny is ultimately—and formally—dismantled.
And with this dynamic in mind, perhaps what distinguishes Janus from the abortion cases is not simply that the Court successfully overruled an earlier precedent but that the conditions were more favorable for doing so. Unlike Abood, which had only recently been questioned, Roe had weathered over four decades of challenges. And critically, these challenges to Roe amplified, rather than settled, political contestation over abortion rights.
On this account, the difference between Janus and June Medical Services is not only the fact of an embattled but resilient precedent, but also the particularly pitched climate that surrounds Roe and abortion rights. Members of the Court have admitted as much. As Justice Scalia observed, with each abortion case, the Court is besieged with “carts full of mail from the public, and streets full of demonstrators” on both sides of the debate. Likewise, the Casey Court frankly acknowledged the fraught political climate in which it reached its decision to uphold Roe. And although public sector unions arouse strong feelings, the issue is unlikely to prompt the kind of deeply divided and highly publicized political responses that attend the abortion debate. In this regard, abortion is a blueprint that provides a template for undermining—and overruling—precedent. And critically, as a means of overruling past precedent, this template, though informed by abortion, may have more force outside of it. For abortion is the Court’s third rail, and as such it is the context in which the Court’s treatment of precedent has evolved to be both an act of interpretive principle and a “political and social compromise.”
Abortion as Shadow
Janus—and indeed, other recent cases involving overruled precedents from within the Court—underscores another important insight: abortion shadows the Court’s stare decisis jurisprudence. On this account, it is not just that abortion cases are among the “precedents on precedent”; it is that whenever the Court thinks about stare decisis and precedent, it is, whether expressly or not, thinking about abortion.
The shadow and pull of abortion can be glimpsed in the anxieties raised in response to Janus. In a stinging dissent in Janus, Justice Kagan lamented the Court’s “6-year campaign to reverse Abood” and the majority’s disregard for the “usual principles of stare decisis,” which demand “special justifications for reversing” an extant precedent. Regardless of the majority’s particular views of Abood, stare decisis “means sticking to some wrong decisions” or providing “a special justification [for departure]—over and above the belief that the precedent was wrongly decided.” Abood, she maintained, was “entrenched in this Nation’s law—and in its economic life,” engendering “massive reliance interests” that counseled in favor of its preservation. event that contraception should fail.” On this account, her fears that Abood, a decision that was embedded in the legal landscape “beyond even the normal precedent,” could be easily jettisoned by five willing members of the Court also speaks to an anxiety that Casey and Roe are similarly vulnerable.
In fact, Justice Kagan was not alone in her sense that Roe and abortion were in the crosshairs. In response to the Court’s decision to overrule a longstanding sovereign immunity precedent in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, Justice Breyer reiterated Justice Kagan’s warning that a majority’s mere disagreement with a past decision did not suffice as the “special justification” necessary to overrule it. Although Justice Breyer “wonder[ed] which cases the Court [would] overrule next,” the answer was clear. Throughout his dissent, he twice referenced Casey, suggesting that the majority’s casual approach to precedent made Casey, and by implication, Roe, ever more vulnerable.
To be sure, it is not only liberal-leaning Justices who conflate discussions of stare decisis with the abortion right. Only a few days before it announced its decision in Hyatt, the Court decided Gamble v. United States, where it considered overruling the separate sovereigns exception to the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against double jeopardy. Although the Court declined to do so, concluding that “a departure from precedent ‘demands special justification,'” Justice Thomas wrote separately “to address the proper role of the doctrine of stare decisis.” As Justice Thomas explained, the Court’s current approach to stare decisis, which demanded fidelity to past decisions even if they were “demonstrably erroneous,” was out of step with the Constitution’s structure of divided government. Slavishly adhering to past decisions made sense in a purely common law tradition, where “judges were tasked with identifying and applying objective principles of law—discerned from natural reason, custom, and other external sources—to particular cases.” But in a constitutional republic, where “[t]he Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties are the law, and the systematic development of the law is accomplished democratically,” the judicial role is more cabined than that of common law courts. Rather than discovering the law, Article III judges need only “interpret and apply written law to the facts of particular cases.” On this account, to follow and uphold a precedent that is “demonstrably incorrect …is tantamount to making law, and adhering to it both disregards the supremacy of the Constitution and perpetuates a usurpation of the legislative power.” Accordingly, Justice Thomas declared that, “[w]hen faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent,” federal courts are duty-bound to “not follow it.”
Although Justice Thomas was writing in the context of a criminal procedure case, his underlying message was understood to go beyond the four corners of Gamble. In requiring the overruling of precedents that are not rooted in a permissible interpretation or application of constitutional or statutory text, Justice Thomas’s muscular approach to stare decisis was viewed by many as pointing directly to the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, which Justice Thomas has repeatedly dismissed as having “no basis in the Constitution.”
And meaningfully, although Justice Thomas wrote for himself alone, voices on both sides of the issue in Gamble echoed his concern about following “demonstrably erroneous” constitutional precedents. Writing for the Gamble majority, Justice Alito noted that although stare decisis has its virtues, “it is also important to be right, especially on constitutional matters.” Although he disagreed with both the majority’s judgment and reasoning, Justice Gorsuch agreed that “while we rightly pay heed to the considered views of those who have come before us,” stare decisis is “at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.” Certainly, both Justices Alito and Gorsuch could have been referring to a more generalized desire to get constitutional interpretation right. But in the pitched climate in which the Court operates, the prospect of abandoning stare decisis looked to many like a gesture toward Roe and abortion. In this regard, though Gamble was nominally about the scope and substance of the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause, its confrontation with stare decisis and the weight of past precedent implicitly implicated Roe and the abortion right. And indeed, whenever the Court discusses stare decisis or articulates an approach to precedent, it is understood to, whether expressly or implicitly, gesture toward the future of abortion rights.
Abortion-Stare Decisis Symbiosis
What are we to make of the symbiotic relationship between the Court’s abortion jurisprudence and its approach to stare decisis? As this Part explains, understanding the relationship between the Court’s abortion jurisprudence and its approach to stare decisis helps to illuminate other dynamics that surround the Court and adjacent institutions. First, understanding the relationship between abortion and stare decisis renders legible the interpretive pluralism that characterizes the Justices’ various approaches to stare decisis. on this account, the relationship between abortion and stare decisis helps to explain why different members of the Court adopt different strategies and methodologies for dealing with precedent. Relatedly, the relationship between abortion rights and precedent also makes sense of our collective interest in and commitment to stasis within the judiciary as an institution. That is, comfort—or indeed, discomfort—with the prospect of changes within the Court, or even in other branches whose work implicates the Court, is directly related to our understanding of the degree to which stare decisis and abortion rights are inextricably intertwined. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, understanding this symbiotic relationship helps to clarify why the abortion right is both deeply entrenched and highly circumscribed in our constitutional landscape.
Interpretive Pluralism
Recognizing the role that abortion plays in anchoring, however implicitly, the Court’s discussions of stare decisis renders more comprehensible the interpretive pluralism that pervades the Court’s approach to precedent. As Professor Randy Kozel has observed, in multimember courts, like the Supreme Court, the prospect of consensus is elusive, if not illusory. No single interpretive methodology prevails on the Court, and indeed, even among those who profess allegiance to a particular methodological approach, there may nonetheless be variations in the way they choose to deploy their favored methodology. In Kozel’s view, the fact of interpretive pluralism helps to explain why the Court’s members often differ in their approaches to precedent and stare decisis. Originalists may view the obligation “to stand by what has been decided” differently from those who profess to be living constitutionalists or pragmatists.
Kozel is surely correct in gauging the impact of diverse interpretive methodologies on individual approaches to stare decisis. That said, what goes undiscussed is the degree to which interpretive methodologies, and thus approaches to precedent, may also be shaped in turn by other factors, including abortion. For example, as a number of commentators have observed, originalism emerged in the 1970s as a means of counteracting the “judicial activism” of the Warren and Burger Courts, including Roe v. Wade. As originalism became the intellectual lingua franca of the conservative legal movement, it took aim at the Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence, and Roe v. Wade particularly, as unrooted in history or constitutional text. By the same token, as other interpretive methodologies emerged to challenge originalism, they often did so by explaining how these competing approaches provided strong justifications for Roe and abortion rights.
Abortion and Roe have informed not only methods of constitutional interpretation, but also the diversity of approaches to stare decisis among the Court’s members. Even among the conservative Justices, who have evinced skepticism of abortion rights, there is variation as to whether and in what circumstances the Court should depart from past precedent.
The flurry of separate writings in Ramos v. Louisiana is exemplary on this point. In the majority opinion in Ramos, Justice Gorsuch insisted that stare decisis is not “an inexorable command,” particularly in constitutional cases, and there may be special justifications that militate in favor of departing from an earlier decision. Like Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh agreed that stare decisis is not absolute but argued for an approach to stare decisis in which courts balance a set of considerations to determine whether and in what circumstances to overrule an extant precedent. For both Justices, fidelity to precedent is not always required, but rather should be exercised flexibly given the circumstances. The intensity of the commitment to following precedent likely tracks the intensity of their interest in maintaining Roe.
This account helps render legible Justice Thomas’s strong views of stare decisis. In his separate concurrence in Ramos, Justice Thomas reiterated the point made a year earlier in his Gamble concurrence: “[T]he Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” Justice Thomas has repeatedly made clear that he views the Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence, and abortion jurisprudence in particular, as unmoored from constitutional text and history. In this regard, his approach to precedent is commensurate with the intensity of his disagreement with the Court’s abortion jurisprudence.
Among the remaining Justices in Ramos, their visions of stare decisis also are likely consistent with the strength of their commitment to maintaining Roe. For example, although Justice Sotomayor concurred in the Court’s judgment in Ramos, she wrote separately to distinguish the circumstances in Ramos from future circumstances in which a majority might be inclined to “cast aside precedent ‘simply because [the majority] now disagrees with’ it.” As she explained, “overruling precedent here is not only warranted, but compelled”—both by Apodaca’s disjunction with extant Sixth Amendment doctrine and by the “legacy of racism” that undergirded the challenged law.
In a similar vein, though Justice Kagan did not write separately in Ramos, she nonetheless joined most of Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion, which maintained that the majority had not identified special justifications that would warrant overruling a precedent in which there were “enormous reliance interests.” No doubt recognizing Ramos’s import for another troublesome precedent from the 1970s, Justice Kagan declined to join the part of Justice Alito’s opinion in which he confidently asserted that, “[b]y striking down a precedent upon which there has been massive and entirely reasonable reliance, the majority sets an important precedent about stare decisis”—one that he “assume[d] … will apply … in future cases.”
This is all to say that although Roe and abortion were not at issue in Ramos, the diversity of approaches to precedent among the Justices highlights the degree to which Roe and the abortion right not only shadow all discussions of precedent, but also may produce a wide diversity of views about whether and how to maintain fidelity to past decisions. Although the opinions in Ramos focused on whether to follow Apodaca, all of the Justices were scanning the jurisprudential horizon, reading the tea leaves for what overruling—or maintaining—Apodaca would likely mean for another embattled precedent.
Investment in Institutional Stasis
Recognizing the degree to which abortion shapes the Court’s understanding of stare decisis also renders legible the investment in institutional stasis that pervades the Court and institutions that impact the Court. By “investment in institutional stasis,” I mean the strong interest in maintaining the Court’s status quo and, perhaps more profoundly, avoiding the collective discomfort that the prospect of change within and around the Court inevitably prompts. The most obvious example of commitment to maintaining the Court’s status quo is the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing that accompanies a vacancy—or even the prospect of a vacancy—on the Court. As Professor Michael Gerhardt has documented, “[a] change in personnel on the Supreme Court is unquestionably the main trigger to a shift in precedent.” On this account, the departure of a Justice—and the arrival of her successor—is often a necessary precondition for a reassessment of past precedents.
Recall the tumult that occurred in 2018 when Justice Kennedy announced his retirement from the Court. Instantaneously, there were questions about what Justice Kennedy’s retirement would mean for the balance of power on the Court—and not surprisingly, much of the discussion focused on what Justice Kennedy’s departure would mean for the future of abortion rights and the continued vitality of Roe. When then-Judge Kavanaugh was nominated to fill the vacant seat, the commentary shifted into overdrive, as his record—on many issues, but especially abortion—was probed for telltale clues about his likely future inclinations as a Justice. And indeed, the public opposition to then-Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was, at least initially, framed in terms of support for abortion rights.
With this dynamic in mind, even a Justice’s personal decision about whether and when to withdraw from the Court is often navigated in the shadow of Roe and abortion rights. When Justice Ginsburg declined to retire during President Obama’s second term, critics argued that, given her past health crises, her decision risked the seat’s falling into the hands of a Republican President eager to appoint a pro-life Justice, imperiling the balance of power on the Court and, in particular, imperiling Roe. In this regard, the prospect of a liberal Justice being replaced by a Republican President was viewed as presaging the disruption of the Court’s status quo and the precarious equipoise of abortion rights.
Later, in a candid interview, Justice Ginsburg suggested that her decision to remain on the bench was informed, at least in part, by an interest in maintaining the fragile status quo. As she explained, “given the [ideological] boundaries that we have [in the Senate],” it was unlikely that President Obama would have been able to replace her with a Justice who was similarly minded on key issues, like women’s rights. Although Justice Ginsburg did not name Roe explicitly, it was surely part of her calculus. In a polarized political climate in which a supermajority of Senators was required to confirm a Supreme Court nominee, President Obama might have been pressed to nominate a candidate whose views on women’s rights and abortion rights were considerably more moderate than those of Justice Ginsburg. And the appointment of a moderate to occupy Justice Ginsburg’s seat would likely have left Roe and abortion rights exposed and vulnerable.
The political firestorm that erupted in the wake of Justice Ginsburg’s passing suggests that these anxieties are not unfounded. Justice Ginsburg’s death created not only a vacancy on the Court, but also an opportunity for the President to cement a 6-3 conservative majority, disrupting the Court’s delicate ideological balance. And as commentators noted, any disruption of the Court’s ideological tilt portends a pitched battle over Roe and the future of abortion rights.
If the prospect of disruption and change on the Court can prompt anxieties about Court vacancies (or even a Justice’s decision to retire), it also may help explain the anxieties that surround rule and policy changes in institutions whose work influences the Court and its composition. Consider the efforts to revise the Senate rules regarding judicial nominations. Ordinarily, the arcane rules of the upper chamber of Congress would not even register for most Americans. However, because the Senate is tasked with providing “Advice and Consent” for Supreme Court nominations, changes in the Senate rules—whether to the number of votes required to appoint a Justice or to end debate on a nominee—have become a topic of public interest. Some of this interest obviously stems from the pitched political climate in which the Court and Congress operate. But quite a lot of the interest in these rules reflects their likely impact on judicial nominations, which in turn reflects the understanding that the nature of the candidates nominated, and ultimately appointed, to the Court will irrevocably affect the Court’s status quo.
The Stickiness and Scope of the Abortion Right
Finally, and perhaps most obviously and importantly, understanding the way that abortion operates as a shadow and pull, shaping the Court’s approach to stare decisis, helps us to better understand why the abortion right is at once deeply entrenched and yet stubbornly narrow in breadth and scope. Because the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade and the abortion right shadows the Court’s efforts to interpret and apply past precedent in all contexts, and especially in the abortion context, the interpretive moves that are available are limited. As Casey makes clear, the Court has been wary of expressly overruling Roe because doing so would likely unleash backlash that would compromise the Court’s legitimacy and public standing.
Rather than overturning the abortion right by overruling Roe, the Court has instead, through its interpretation of precedent, focused on limiting the right and curtailing its breadth. Casey and Gonzales both reflected this impulse. In Casey, the Court winnowed the scope of the right first articulated in Roe, widening the State’s legislative authority over abortion and prescribing a less rigorous standard of review for courts to deploy in reviewing abortion regulations. Likewise, in Gonzales, the Court again widened the State’s authority to limit the abortion right by upholding a regulation enacted without the benefit of a health exception and by broadly deferring to the legislature’s stated purpose in enacting the challenged law. June Medical Services was also consistent with this impulse. Rather than expressly overruling Whole Woman’s Health, Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence narrowed the scope of that decision by relieving states of the obligation to ensure that the benefits of a proposed abortion restriction outweigh the burdens it imposes on the right itself.
Yet even as the Court’s interpretive moves have narrowed the abortion right, the right has stubbornly survived, becoming solidly embedded in the firmament of constitutional law. Roe’s entrenchment was evident in the 2005 confirmation hearings for then-Judge Roberts. In a colloquy with then-Judge Roberts, Senator Specter, then the chair of the Judiciary Committee, asked whether then-Judge Roberts agreed that Roe had become a “superprecedent” or even a “super-duper precedent”—that is, a decision “so deeply embedded in the fabric of law [it] should be especially hard to overturn.” Senator Specter was reiterating a view of stare decisis initially articulated by Judge Luttig, who, in the context of a challenge to an abortion restriction, referred to Roe v. Wade’s “super-stare decisis” status due to the Court’s continual refusal to overrule it.
Although then-Judge Roberts avoided giving a direct answer, the question of Roe’s “superprecedent” status has surfaced at subsequent confirmation hearings, including at those of the two most recent Court appointees. Regardless of what one thinks of a theory of “super-stare decisis” and “superprecedent,” the fact of its discussion suggests the inherent difficulty of overruling Roe. If Roe is understood as a superprecedent, fixed in the constitutional landscape, then overruling it would invariably expose the Court to claims of partisanship and political opportunism. And this, in turn, helps explain why the abortion right has, over time, become increasingly narrow. Because the abortion right is “sticky,” having been repeatedly reaffirmed, it cannot be overruled without a fight. Accordingly, in order to curb the right while avoiding the conflict that its overruling would prompt, the Court has instead interpreted and distinguished abortion precedents in ways that preserve the right while simultaneously cabining it. Casey’s revision of Roe is the most obvious example of this dynamic, but Chief Justice Roberts’s treatment of Whole Woman’s Health is the most recent.
The dichotomy of a right that is at once stubbornly durable and startlingly narrow reflects the symbiotic dynamic of abortion and precedent. Stare decisis has shaped abortion jurisprudence, entrenching the abortion right while narrowing its scope. And in turn abortion has informed the doctrine of stare decisis such that any discussion of precedent necessarily implicates the future of abortion, whether abortion is at issue or not.
Conclusion
Stepping forward to argue on behalf of the abortion providers in June Medical Services v. Russo, Julie Rikelman reminded the Court and all assembled that “[t]his case is about respect for the Court’s precedent.” Rikelman, of course, was referring to the fact that the Court, just four years earlier, had invalidated a Texas admitting privileges law that was virtually identical to the Louisiana law challenged in June Medical Services. But Rikelman’s opening statement was correct on yet another level. June Medical Services, like every other case concerning the abortion right, “is about respect for the Court’s precedent.”
It was not surprising that Rikelman framed her argument in terms of stare decisis. In the years since Roe was decided, those who have stepped forward to defend the embattled precedent have also emphasized stare decisis and the Court’s duty to respect precedent. The appeal to stare decisis in abortion cases serves dual purposes. It connects the case at bar to an unbroken line of precedent in which a woman’s right to choose an abortion has consistently been upheld. But more profoundly, it is an effort to strip the Court’s decisionmaking of the vexed political climate that cloaks the abortion right. It is an appeal to individual Justices to put aside their particular views of abortion and Roe in favor of the broader principles on which the rule of law is based. On this account, the invocation of stare decisis is an appeal to the “neutral principles” that, we are told, should guide jurists instead of their own political sensibilities
The fact that so many lawyers intent on defending Roe have appealed to stare decisis underscores the mutually constitutive relationship between abortion and precedent. Precedent has shaped the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, but the Court’s abortion jurisprudence has also shaped its approach to precedent. In this regard, the relationship between the Court’s understanding of the abortion right and its understanding of stare decisis and precedent is inextricably intertwined and mutually dependent. But the symbiosis between abortion and precedent is not simply about jurisprudence. The symbiotic relationship between abortion and precedent has also shaped our public discourse about the Court as an institution. The association of stare decisis with abortion has amplified the Court’s importance in political disputes and heightened anxiety about the prospect of institutional change.
And perhaps most importantly, it has shaped our understanding of stare decisis. Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence in June Medical Services is illustrative on this point. There, the Chief Justice extravagantly embraced stare decisis, noting that although he had dissented from the majority’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health, the fact of the Court’s decision in that case compelled his vote to invalidate the Louisiana admitting privileges law. In so doing, Chief Justice Roberts was appealing to the neutral principles that Rikelman alluded to in her opening statement to the Court. Precedent, not politics, had commanded his vote in the instant case.
In many ways, Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence recalled his statements at his 2005 confirmation hearing. There, he famously analogized the judicial role to that of a baseball umpire, whose job it is “to call balls and strikes.” What then-Judge Roberts failed to say was that it is also the umpire’s job to determine—indeed, to judge—where the strike zone lies.
Just as the seemingly neutral exercise of calling balls and strikes is undergirded by the exercise of judgment, so too is stare decisis. The act of following precedent may yield a range of interpretive choices that may admit politicized and ideological judgment. Again, the Chief Justice’s concurrence in June Medical Services is instructive. Despite his professed allegiance to following precedent, the Chief Justice’s approach to stare decisis was contingent and selective, undermining Whole Woman’s Health, the very precedent it purported to follow. And in so doing, it yielded an outcome that was hardly value-neutral—it effaced the profound impact of Whole Woman’s Health for future abortion challenges, returning the law to the pre-2016 status quo.
On this account, June Medical Services is a decision about abortion and precedent—and the relationship between the two. But more profoundly, it is a decision that speaks to the relationship between the Court, its institutional identity, and its efforts to respect both abortion rights and precedent at the same time.