Who’s Afraid of Gradualism in Dobbs?

The Supreme Court may be poised to overrule Roe v. Wade and eliminate all constitutional abortion rights. That sweeping result is teed up in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case to be argued on Wednesday. Yet whether to overrule nearly 50 years of precedent is not a question that the Court is prepared to answer. Even though both parties and many observers are eager for a final reckoning with abortion rights, the public and the Court itself would be far better served by a more gradual, judicious approach.

The initial problem is that, in Dobbs, the Court has not followed its normal deliberative process. Instead, Mississippi asked the justices to review an abortion prohibition that posed no disagreement among lower courts or any other conventional basis for review. After sitting on the case for nearly a year, the justices finally agreed to consider a single issue: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” That question focuses on viability, is concerned with whether “all” relevant restrictions are categorically unlawful, and identifies no specific precedent to be overruled. Onlookers were accordingly left to debate just what the Court had in mind in granting the case. 

Mississippi then seized the initiative by submitting a merits brief that primarily argued for overruling all precedents recognizing abortion rights—a possibility that the state’s certiorari petition had raised, if at all, only in a half-hearted footnote. So what had seemed like an important but limited challenge to abortion rights suddenly became a broadside attack on decades of case law. In response, the abortion providers objected to Mississippi’s bait-and-switch and briefly asked for dismissal of the case; but they also agreed that “There are no half-measures here.” So the parties ultimately offer the same unyielding choice between two starkly opposing options.

Yet advocates have strategic reasons for framing certain options for the Court while excluding others. Lawyers might avoid offering a half measure for fear of undermining their main argument, particularly when they are left to guess about the justices’ views. And political activists might prefer that the Court issue a precipitous ruling so that they can better mobilize against the judiciary. A partial defeat in court might be far less useful for politicos precisely because it would appear more legitimate or non-partisan. For these reasons, litigants do not necessarily speak for all affected people, and the fact that both sides pose a stark choice may only prove that the adversarial system has given way to political polarization. 

Normal caution might seem unnecessary in Dobbs because the issue of abortion rights is already so familiar to the justices. What law school graduate, after all, has failed to think about Roe? But partial knowledge is often the most confident, and deliberation has a way of revealing things we didn’t expect. Gradualism can also allow the Court to learn from experience rather than armchair speculation. The Dobbs briefs are full of predictions about what would happen—doctrinally, practically, and politically—if abortion case law changed. By moving incrementally, the Court can begin to replace those predictions with facts and ultimately make a more informed decision at a later date. 

The Roberts Court has repeatedly shown a similar instinct for gradualism. Before major decisions on issues like campaign finance regulation and same-sex marriage, for instance, the Court signaled its interest in issuing a transformative ruling long before actually doing so. In the meantime, the Court moved slowly, taking only small steps before bold action. The idea that the Court should give notice before issuing a disruptive decision, which I have called “the doctrine of one last chance,” has many benefits. Giving the losing side one last chance to make its case can clarify how the justices are reasoning through the issue, expose that reasoning to sustained scrutiny and criticism, and prompt the Court to adjust course. Even if the Court follows through on its initial views, providing notice can prompt action by the political branches and help smooth out disruptive legal changes. 

The Court’s newest justices have continued the one-last-chance approach. Earlier this year, the Court considered whether to overrule a major precedent on religious liberty. Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, declined to do so—not because they thought the precedent was correct, but rather because they were unsure just how to replace it. There is no doubt that these justices have thought deeply about religious liberty, yet they still saw wisdom in proceeding cautiously. And that intuition may already have been borne out, given the “difficulty” of later cases. In Dobbs, a similar approach could support a limited holding, a request for additional briefing and argument, or dismissal of the case.

In an indirect way, the Court has already produced something like incrementalism on abortion rights. By allowing Texas’s SB8 to operate for several months, the justices have essentially allowed a major state to create a post-Roe world. But while that experience has fostered public debate and been informative in some ways, litigation over SB8 has so far focused on complex procedural issues, not the substantive and precedential questions pertinent to Dobbs. Given those differences, and the fact that the briefing in Dobbs was well underway when SB8 came into effect, the events in Texas are no substitute for caution in Dobbs itself. 

Of course, judicial gradualism can only achieve so much. Because the nation is divided by starkly conflicting legal and policy views on abortion, Dobbs will be met with second-guessing, if not condemnation, no matter how it comes out. Criticism, as they say, comes with the territory. What the Court can control, however, is whether it treats the issue of abortion rights with the care it deserves. Roe itself was famously faulted, including by Justice Ginsburg, for moving too fast. It would be ironic if Roe’s latest critics have failed to learn that lesson.

Stare Decisis as Crying Wolf

Stare decisis is in the news again as the Supreme Court begins to consider requests to overrule abortion-rights precedents. To a great extent, the justices have spent years preparing for this moment, as every recent debate over precedent has seemingly had abortion rights looming in the background. Dissenting justices have adopted certain rhetorical strategies, and majority justices have had to respond. 

I explore this rhetorical dynamic in a forthcoming paper (Reason and Rhetoric in Edwards v. Vannoy) and reproduce a slightly edited excerpt below:

Imagine that you are a justice who generally hopes to protect existing case law from erosion or repudiation. You might think it is a good idea to complain about each and every instance of overruling, so as to keep stare decisis salient and make the majority coalition pay an ever-increasing “price” in professional and public esteem. But you would also worry about coming across as Chicken Little, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. It isn’t always a big deal to overrule, even when doing so is wrong. And, sometimes, overruling is positively the right thing to do. Much as the Court would lose face by overruling too freely, as though precedent were legally irrelevant, dissenters can sacrifice their credibility by acting as though every new overruling is a fresh End of Days. So, what’s a dissenter to do?

…

One way of squaring the rhetorical circle is to try and have it both ways at different points in time. This solution requires selective forgetting: the importance of stare decisis is trumpeted in dissent after dissent, but the doom-and-gloom rhetoric attending each dissent is instantly swept under the rug. The point of this strategy is to make each transgression of stare decisis seem unprecedented, as though stare decisis had been eroded for the first time. A less helpful understanding of events, namely, that stare decisis has proven to be quite flexible, is thus kept out of view. This approach counts on the reader’s short memory—and, ironically, on the forgettability of the dissenter’s earlier rhetorical flourishes. 

…

All this raises the question of how the majority coalition might respond to our imagined dissenter’s rhetorical strategizing. The majority might do just what the dissenter hopes: wince at each rhetorical lashing, try to avoid the next one, and generally think hard before overruling. But there is another salient possibility: much as the public could come to wonder whether the dissenter is overdoing it, the majority might decide that there is no satisfying the opposition. Someone who cannot see that overrulings are sometimes justified—or just not a big deal—might not be worth appeasing. Thus, the majority could become numb to the lashing, and unafraid to overrule. The strong rhetoric against overruling would have defeated itself.

That reasoning can be taken still further. A cynical majority might put itself on the lookout for precedents to overrule. Not just any precedent will do, of course. Overruling cases that are either too important or too sound would tend to feed the dissenter’s critical flame. But when precedents are contrary to the would-be dissenter’s view of the merits, or else not terribly important, a decision to overrule can put the dissenter in a bind: she would have to moderate her rhetoric or else risk coming across as crying wolf. Notably, Ramos and Edwards respectively fit each half of that strategy, with Ramos, which established a right to unanimous criminal jury verdicts, appealing to (and splintering) the Court’s left wing and Edwards, which declined to apply Ramos retroactively in habeas cases, “overruling” only a never-used exception.

Remedying Removal: Mueller and the CFPB Case

Many commentators have discussed whether President Trump could lawfully fire Special Counsel Mueller, despite a DOJ regulation providing that the special counsel may be removed only for cause by the Attorney General. But even if the president lacked lawful authority to remove Mueller, would any meaningful judicial remedy follow? Remarkably, the DC Circuit recently discussed this general issue during the en banc oral argument in the CFPB removal case.

Morales-Santana’s Many Judgments (SCOTUS Symposium)

Yesterday, Morales-Santana held that an individual had been denied citizenship based on a gender-discriminatory law that violated equal protection. Yet the only practical effect appears to be that, in the future, even fewer people will obtain citizenship. That outcome has already prompted a lot of commentary, including from Howard, Ian, and Will. Here, I add two points. First, the Court’s exclusively “prospective” remedy appears not to have fully remedied the asserted discrimination, even on the Court’s theory. Second, the Court’s limited grant of relief interestingly blurs the traditional distinction between precedent and judgment.

Blaming Dissents in Gant and Lightfoot

The Supreme Court sometimes abandons longstanding or widespread readings of its own precedents by blaming a dissenting opinion. “Our previous majority was fairly clear,” the Court effectively says, “except that the dissent in the relevant case cast a spell over readers, leading them astray.” This practice of blaming dissents is both interesting and consequential, appearing for example in Gant as well as the recent decision in Lightfoot.

Justice Kagan on Textualism’s Success

Justice Elena Kagan recently gave the “Scalia Lecture” at Harvard Law School. The event, which is visible online, consisted of a conversation between Kagan and Professor John Manning. For those interested in interpretive trends at the Court, this video is worth watching.  As a scholar-jurist, Kagan speaks both broadly and specifically about her approach to text. And besides being erudite and accessible, the conversation manages to be charming, too.

Kagan’s lecture reinforces a conventional wisdom on textualism’s recent success. Early on (9:10), Kagan beautifully describes the Scalian turn in statutory interpretation while acknowledging its incompleteness. Over time, anti-textualist views have fallen away, so that the center of gravity has moved toward Scalia. Yet Scalia still lies near one end of a spectrum. Both Kagan and Manning adduced evidence of this shift. But the most powerful proof of this claim is the lecture itself. When Kagan, a recent democratic appointee to the Supreme Court, gives a “Scalia Lecture” at Harvard Law School and says (8:25) that “we’re all textualists now,” she has already gone a long way toward proving that point.

But even Kagan’s nuanced lecture, like the conventional wisdom, may give an exaggerated impression of textualism’s ascendance. While certain strong versions of purposivism are all but vanquished, the Court’s most recent term and even Kagan’s own comments suggest that a more moderate, evolved form of purposive reasoning is alive and well.

Does Fisher I Establish Jurisdiction For Fisher II?

Fisher v. University of Texas, raises an important question about the constitutionality of affirmative action in university admissions, but it also poses a jurisdictional riddle. When Fisher came to the Supreme Court a few years ago, there was fairly extensive debate, including at oral argument, as to whether the Court had jurisdiction to hear the case. But in ruling in favor of the plaintiff and remanding the case, the justices said not a word about jurisdiction. Last year, I wrote a post asking whether Fisher I should be understood as a precedent on jurisdiction. Now the case is back at the Court, and UT is again pressing jurisdictional arguments. Will these renewed arguments have any sway, and should they?

Debating Determinacy in Constitutional Theory

Can constitutional theory be both persuasive and determinate? A recent, must-read exchange between Michael Dorf and Larry Solum implicitly raises this question. In the exchange, Dorf ultimately posits the “Brown test,” which demands that any constitutional theory must make possible the result in Brown v. Board, but need not require that result. The exchange (which Paul Horwitz has already collected and commented on here) illustrates that there are importantly different ways of assessing a constitutional theory’s determinacy. Below, I outline relevant features of the Dorf/Solum posts, explore the relationship between theory and determinacy, and suggest a reformulation of the Brown test. In short, I suggest that evaluations of constitutional theories should emphasize what the theories most encourage, as opposed to what is possible, necessary, or reasonable under those theories.

Lower Courts on Supreme Court Signaling

Debates over signaling, or unconventional precedential guidance to lower courts, played an important role in the same-sex marriage litigation leading up to Obergefell. Now, signaling is back thanks to religious accommodation litigation concerning the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. Remarkably, lower courts have started to develop case law on whether and when signaling is appropriate.

Narrowing the Third-Party Doctrine From Below

The Fourth Circuit made headlines yesterday in United States v. Graham, which holds in part that “warrantless procurement of [cell site location information] was an unreasonable search” in violation of the Fourth Amendment. There’s a lot going on in the Graham majority and dissent, and I recommend Orin’s ongoing posts on the merits. But it’s also interesting to consider Graham’s treatment of Supreme Court precedent regarding the “third-party doctrine.”

In my view, much of the disagreement between the majority and dissent in Graham is about whether to adopt the best reading of the Supreme Court’s third-party precedents or, instead, to narrowly read those precedents in light of new factual developments, other Supreme Court precedents, and the lower-court judges’ own first-principles views of the law. In this respect, Graham is hardly anomalous. When doctrines become out of date, the Court sometimes encourages lower courts to engage in narrowing from below, thereby facilitating the Court’s own reconsideration of precedent. The third-party doctrine is properly viewed as such an area.