Supreme Court of US 2007 Term Review

SCOTUSblog has a Round-Up: Grants, Decisions & End-of-Term Analysis.

On June 28th, the American Constitution Society held it's annual Supreme Court Term Review. It's an hour and a half long and there's video and audio available at the site. I found it really interesting. ACSBlog has some shorter posts about it too. The first is a collection of quotes.

Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan: "Obviously the result is different because Justice O'Conner was replaced by Justice Alito. But the tone of this opinion is really quite extraordinary because it has shifted from abortion regulations being designed to further the states interest in human life alone, into a case, and I'm probably going to regret this in a moment after I say this but, that women will later regret their decisions and so in order to protect them we have to save them. And I think this is what got the liberals on the court so upset with the decision. The decision is written in a tone in which the pregnant women is referred to almost entirely as the mother; although these women have made the decision that they do not want to be mothers now. The fetus is always referred to as the unborn child. The doctors are not referred to as physicians but as abortionists. And so this really is a case where the purports to be issuing a narrow decision; that it's just forbidding this one practice an therefore there's no undue burden on women; but the rationale the Court has given here would allow them I think to ban any abortion procedure. Because any woman might regret. Now of course, you might wonder how does the Court know this? And Justice Kennedy is quite candid the Court knows this because it looked deep inside itself. At several points, he said there’s no evidence to support my position, but I don’t need no stinking evidence. And so, I think this is a really fundamental change in the Court’s sensibility about abortion, and it’s played out . . . in a number of other cases where the Court said we don’t actually need evidence because we know this to be true. I'm mean we're back to the Declaration of Independence now, we hold these truths to be self evident women will regret the abortions they have and therefore in order to prevent this we have to save them by denying them the ability to make a choice."

Former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger (I made my best guess at case names in this transcript): "Scalia notes, Scalia in one of his best passages says the court beat Slash to a pulp and throws it's desiccated body out on the street to be picked over while technically alive. I assumed in part it's perhaps that the encomiums we heard in stare decisis by Justices Roberts and Alito in their confirmation hearing makes them hesitant. They said they were not overruling Stemberg in the partial birth abortion case and they overruled it. They said they were not overruling Flast and by their opinion they would have overruled it. They said they were not overruling McConnell in the campaign finance statutes and actually did. The argument that the Chief Justice makes is that that's the more minimal restrained approach. You don't do more than you have to do and if you can distinguish a case then you shouldn't go further. But when it gets to this point I think it just creates incoherence in the law."

Geoffrey Stone has more on Roberts and Alito and how they're violating the stare decisis while they claim they aren't. Vikram David Amar writes in FindLaw about the Hein decision and how it represents this court's decisions.