Name that speaker
In honor of my current preparation for the multiple choice section of the bar exam, I’ve decided to have some multiple choice fun with Roe v. Wade. (A case that is sure to be mentioned, at least once, during the upcoming battle over a replacement for Justice Rehnquist.) Dust off your thinking caps and pick the least incorrect answer to the question.
Who said:
[T]he Court’s initial 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade . . . became and remains a storm center. Roe v. Wade sparked public opposition and academic criticism, in part, I believe, because the Court ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action.
(a) Professor Cass Sunstein
(b) Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
(c) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(d) Attorney Sarah Weddington
Answer below the fold.
While Professor Sunstein has made statements that sound similar in their logic, he did not utter those words.
Justice O’Connor was part of the plurality of Justices in Planned Parenthood v. Casey who, in 1992, upheld the essential holding of Roe, but imposed less demanding restrictions on laws regulating abortion.
Attorney Sarah Weddington argued the case on behalf of Norma McCorvey (Roe), and has since dedicated herself to “speaking, teaching, and writing.” Weddington has lamented the weakening of Roe’s original holding.
The least incorrect answer is C. My friend Shawn Naccarato, aka “Atticus Nacc,” pointed me to a 1984 lecture delivered by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the University of North Carolina School of Law wherein she was critical of the Roe opinion. Justice Ginsburg went on to say:
Roe ventured too far in the change it ordered. The sweep and detail of the opinion stimulated the mobilization of a right-to-life movement and an attendant reaction in Congress and state legislatures. In place of the trend toward liberalization of abortion statutes noted in Roe, legislatures adopted measures aimed at minimizing the impact of the 1973 rulings, including notification and consent requirements, prescriptions for the protection of fetal life, and bans on public expenditures for poor women’s abortions.
The lecture was not aimed at energizing the pro-life community, nor criticizing the right to an abortion per se. Rather, she criticized the Roe majority for choosing not to reach the same outcome–a right to abortion–on other grounds (i.e. equality of the sexes). A published version of the lecture can be found at 63 N.C. L. Rev. 375 (1985), under the title Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade.
2 Responses to “Name that speaker”
This whole thing remindss me of Robert Bork’s famous violation of the 9th amendment during his hearings back in 1987.
People who gripe about activist judges who “make law out of whole cloth and forget about the plain language of the Constitution” haven’t actually read the thing.
If you actully do some reading on the subject, you’ll discover that the “activist” judges of the 1960s and ’70s basically went back to the plain text of the constitution and overturned what “activist” judges of exactly a century earlier did by proclaiming the 14th amendment null and void.
Where would you direct an interested reader? As to Ginsberg, no one ever said she wasn’t bright but having latched on to what appears to be a truth why could she not, in her official capacity, have acted upon it? That case holds the whole legal profession up for justified ridicule.