This term saw most clearly that the dedication and various machinations of former President Donald Trump and former Senate Majority Leader (now Minority Leader) Mitch McConnell have, to a non-negligible extent, paid off. First Amendment and Second Amendment rights are more secure, lower-case “r” republican self-governance is closer to being restored, and many unborn children will be spared. These are unambiguous substantive goods.
At the same time, none of the success of the past term—which we can already see may not always hold up, as in the case of religious freedom and the currently pending litigation of Yeshiva University in New York City (which is off to an inauspicious start)—has anything to say about future terms. And more generally, the jurisprudential debates, including my own proposal for “common good originalism,” are not going anywhere.
In the previous 2021 October Term, the Court overruled a nearly fifty years old precedent, the Roe v. Wade abortion decision. That symbolizes the paradigm shift in constitutional interpretation. Why has the abortion debate become the center of constitutional attention? What is your view on the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe v. Wade?
Abortion is the seminal culture war issue in present America, but it was not necessarily always that way; it only became that way when the Court ruled as it did in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The Dobbs decision, which is one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions in recent memory,
undid a grievous moral and constitutional wrong,