Bowing to Precedent

...Eventually the questions took an odd turn, with Specter asking Alito whether he agreed that the right to abortion had special immunity from reconsideration, that is, whether it is "super-precedent...

...In defending such laws, very serious lawyers have mounted, and will continue to mount, challenges to the Court's abortion precedents...

...in fact, both of these considerations suggest that Roe should To an innocent mind, the fact that many people fervently think you are wrong might be a reason to suspect that perhaps you are wrong...

...Alito, like any good lawyer, makes his living by working from the logic of prior cases...

...More generally, in its discussion of judicial legitimacy, the Court in Casey refers to the perception of legality rather than the reality...

...It is true that Plessy contains the factual claims that the Court in Casey quoted...

...Indeed, it touches on ideas that are basic to understanding why the Court has become such a dangerous institution and whether the appointments of Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts are likely to change things...

...Similarly, while Brown relied on some psychological and educational speculations, it also stands for the broad principle that the equal protection clause does prohibit social inequality between blacks and whites...

...As Specter has pointed out in various confirmation hearings through the years, Marbury v. Madison, the iconic 1803 case that established the power of courts not to enforce statutes that they consider to be unconstitutional, is not going to be overruled, nor is the Supreme Court going to consider overruling it...

...Note: not the amount of error that might properly (as a matter of law) be imputed but the amount that might be made plausible to the public...

...That sort of terminology, Alito said, reminded him "of the size of the laundry detergent in the supermarket...

...No wonder Specter asked if Roe were not now super-precedent...

...So Specter's questions about stare decisis were not tangential or technical...

...Again, the obvious thought would be that judicial decisions that do not generate this kind of acceptance ought to have less precedential weight...

...It is quite possible, in fact, that among the general public the legitimacy of the Court is based partly on the belief that the judiciary does respond to politics and thus tends to produce results with which many people agree...

...It distinguished this reliance from the settled social expectations created by Plessy on the ground that the doctrine of "separate but equal" had rested on the factual assumption that legal separation of the races did not imply the inferiority of blacks unless (as the Plessy Court put it) "the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it...

...They go to the heart of the question of whether even sustained, apparently effective efforts to rein in the Supreme Court through the appointment process can be more than marginally effective...

...Other sections of the Casey opinion, however, point us toward a fuller, if dismaying, understanding of why some of the justices think the constitutional right to abortion should be set in cement...

...A necessary first step is to drop the inflated conception of the Court's role inherent in the word "super-precedent...

...Moreover, it is not at all self-evident that the public thinks constitutional decisions are immune from political considerations or that this sort of realism would lead people to the conclusion that the Court is an illegitimate institution...

...A Court that has repeatedly set about transforming society cannot be dedicated to predictability as an overriding value...

...If the original abortion decision is super-precedent and the Court in Casey emphatically affirmed that extraordinary status, then Casey must be super-duper precedent...

...More ominously, since the American people's capacity to see themselves as living under the rule of law is tied to "their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to . . . speak before all others for their constitutional ideals," undermining the Court's legitimacy would threaten American constitutionalism and, in the end, the "Nation's commitment to the rule of law...

...Much of that opinion is concerned with, and one could even say transfixed by, the fact that over the years much "political fire" has been directed at Roe...

...Recently, for instance, the Court refused to allow Congress to make changes in the regime of police warnings to suspects required by the once heavily criticized Miranda decision...

...Thus, while it is doubtful that Alito thinks the Court's famous 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade, was solidly based in the Constitution, it is certainly possible that he might be too devoted to precedent to overrule it...

...Respect for precedent means not only that the justices should follow the specific outcomes of prior cases but also that they must follow their logic...

...Now, the claim that the Constitution protects a right to abortion is an interpretive legal principle, in kind much like the claim in Plessy that the equal protection clause does not require social equality...

...The first of these was that the Constitution protects the right to abortion and, therefore, "[b]efore viability, the State's interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial obstacle to the woman's effective right to elect the procedure...

...Moreover, while the scope of the public's reliance on Plessy was clear and undeniable, the nature of the reliance interest in Roe is difficult to identify...

...Casey's rather frantic concern for the Court's legitimacy is hard to explain...

...No such change in factual understandings could, the Court concluded, justify the defeat of the expectations generated by Roe...

...Used in this way, the idea of a "super-precedent" is superfluous...

...When the Court in Casey announced that Roe was a kind of super-precedent, it pointed to a range of ways in which people had come to rely on the right to abortion...

...In fact, Casey comes close to insisting on the opposite: that the Court should stay with a decision wrongly interpreting the Constitution because a reversal of that wrong decision would meet with public criticism and disapproval...

...Consider, as just one possibility, the impact on social practices and widely shared understandings if the Court were to accept the invitation to keep the Constitution changing with the times by declaring heterosexual marriage laws unconstitutional...

...The Court sometimes sees this logic, or at least a happy corollary...

...States have passed many statutes intended to test and limit the 1973 abortion decision, the Justice Department has several times called on the Court to reverse that decision, and many political demonstrations (as well as some violence) have been directed at both the right of abortion and the Court responsible for it...

...A judicial decision is beyond direct challenge when it would not occur to anyone to attempt such a challenge...

...Such precedents are beyond reconsideration, not because they are intellectually unassailable, but because for a variety of reasons they are so widely accepted by the public and the legal profession that it would not occur to any serious lawyer to challenge them...

...In particular, citizens who had supported the right to abortion out of respect for the Court's authority and despite intense criticism of Roe would feel betrayed by a reversal and naturally believe that the Court had capitulated to political pressure...

...Is the idea that women in the workforce would suddenly feel out of place because abortion was no longer available and that they would flee back to domesticity...

...The Court then considers the broader effect that the right to abortion has had on women's choices and understandings...

...While Plessy relied on some psychological speculation, it also stood for the broad principle that the equal protection clause was not intended "to enforce social . . . equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either...

...That Alito should have a bit of fun with this logic is encouraging, but it does not tell us how willing he would be to reconsider constitutional precedents...

...Of course, the Casey Court does not say outright that Roe was bad law...

...Although the practice of sticking with precedent is often associated in popular understanding with stodgy legalism, it was a shrewd subject for Specter to choose...

...But the justices do acknowledge the possibility that Roe might have been in error, and they do refer to "the reservations [some justices] may have in reaffirming the central holding of Roe...

...One would hardly expect that...

...entitled to a special degree of respect as precedent...

...But the justices in Casey give a portentous reason for why the fact of strong disagreement with Roe is a reason to refuse to overrule it...

...This exchange, which must have puzzled most Americans, was highly significant...

...The doctrine that Roe is a super-precedent makes completely clear—as do scores of decisions that rest on precedent rather than on the Constitution itself—that the justices (and their apologists) now believe that the authority of the Court's decisions is more important than the authority of our fundamental law...

...Perceived as a political institution, the Court would lose legitimacy...

...That is, it is inclined to see agreement as a reason to think its decisions are right...

...But that is not precisely the argument made in Casey...

...It is important, therefore, to consider carefully the justifications for the ideas of precedent and (God help us) super-precedent...

...It says, to be precise, that it is important that the Court appear to be abiding by legal principle...

...This rather self-congratulatory paragraph appears to be saying that the Court's discovery of a right to abortion initiated the emancipation of women by altering roles and values and, more concretely, by inducing women to enter into sexual relationships as well as into jobs...

...It might be objected that it is somehow different for the Court to unsettle expectations that it had no role in creating than for it to unsettle expectations created by its own precedents...

...In fact, ideas that no one had ever previously thought to advance—that the Constitution protects a right to abortion, for instance—have over and over again been suddenly handed down by the Supreme Court...

...Insofar as Casey rests on the relationship between judicial legitimacy and stare decisis, the Court is arguing that public opinion—in the form of attitudes about the Court—should trump law...

...Thus intense opposition to the original abortion decision becomes a reason, not to doubt that decision, but to reaffirm it...

...Nominees to the Court can repeat endlessly that judges should interpret, not make, law...

...It has led Americans to lose political self-confidence and to depend pathetically on the judiciary to resolve the most pressing public issues...

...Leaving aside the handful of unchallengeable decisions, various reasons have been offered for deferring to a constitutional decision...

...The fact of the matter is that reversing Roe would not necessarily even eliminate the availability of abortion, since different states would presumably come to different judgments about how that procedure should be regulated...

...At any rate, the justices could have reversed Roe's moral conclusion about the relative value of these interests—or they could have decided that courts are not capable of making this kind of assessment—without reversing any legal principle...

...These sweeping changes sometimes upset laws passed in every state, and they often undermine deeply entrenched moral norms and behaviors...

...It is certain that multitudes of lawyers, most law professors, and virtually all political scientists believe that the Court is influenced by political considerations...

...And they do say that these reservations are overcome only by a reexami-nation of the constitutional questions involved, "combined with the force of stare decisis" (emphasis added...

...Even as it declares that law must be separate from public opinion it elevates the public's opinion of the Court above law...

...The logic of legions of cases demands that judges second-guess legislative and executive decisions on the most sensitive moral and political issues and that judges decide for themselves on the appropriate means for achieving preferred policies...

...The same is true for the famous school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education...

...At the same time, since judicial resolutions tend to be couched in the language of high principle, the Court's role has reduced the opportunity for political compromise and thus has inflamed passions and distrust...

...In reliance on this decision, states across the South extended Jim Crow until public services ranging from public schools to drinking fountains were legally segregated...

...The justices had no evidence about the public's knowledge of the doctrine of precedent, no evidence that people think the Court seldom overrules prior decisions, and no evidence that the public loses respect for the Court when it does reverse a prior ruling...

...The passage is worth examining: [F]or two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion...

...But, again straying rather far from conventional legal issues, the Court goes on to note the improbability of people engaging in sexual behavior because of Roe v. Wade as well as the likelihood that "reproductive planning could take virtually immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions...

...Thus, explained the Court, the public could see the overruling of Plessy as being based on a new understanding of human psychology rather than on a change of legal principle...

...By 1954, "society's understanding of [these] facts" had changed...

...The simple fact is that constitutional law as set out in the cases now requires judges to legislate from the bench...

...It is an arresting question how a judge can assess whether the wide array of purposes that a woman can have in seeking an abortion are more important than a state's interest in, say, protecting potential human life or keeping a husband apprised of his wife's plan to terminate her pregnancy...

...The cruelty and prejudice inherent in that way of life should not obscure what decades of bitter, sometimes violent resistance to desegregation amply demon-strated—that the Court's long campaign against segregation was an assault on deeply held expectations and long established patterns of behavior...

...Specter was doing so at a time when the line between political considerations and legal considerations has largely vanished even in the way that the justices attempt to justify their judgments...

...But unless they are willing, once on the Court, to rethink the logic of prior cases, they will have to make law...

...However, it is only necessary to notice another of the senator's concerns to see that these costs cannot by themselves always be a decisive factor...

...Or that women who had entered into marriage or affairs because of the availability of abortion would suddenly regret their relationships...

...The police, you see, had eventually come to accept the required procedures, and, indeed, the warnings had become accepted as "a part of our national culture...

...Certainly, allowing states to regulate abortion again would not directly dismantle a pervasive social system, as overruling the doctrine of separate but equal did...

...Most of the specific cases that Specter asked Alito about—for example, the decision establishing a constitutional right of minors to contraceptives—are not super-precedents in this sense...

...For instance, it asserts, "There is a limit to the amount of error that can plausibly be imputed to prior Courts...

...This apartheid, as everyone knows, remained legally entrenched until 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown held that racially segregated schools could not be equal...

...But even assuming Roe had a major part to play, how exactly would reversing Roe undermine any of this...

...Because Roe had resolved an "intensely divisive controversy" and, indeed, had called the opposing sides in this controversy "to end their . . . division," reversing Roe would be seen by the general public as a "surrender to political pressure...

...Go back, for example, to 1896 when in the notorious case of Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court determined that racially segregated public facilities did not violate the requirement of equal protection of the laws as long as the facilities were physically equal...

...Other Republican appointees—including Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter—refused in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to overrule Roe largely because they think it is Robert F. Nagel is a professor of law at the University of Colorado and author of The Implosion ofAmerican Federalism (Oxford...

...And it is also true that Brown, relying on some dubious social science, asserts the opposite understanding of the psychology of segregation...

...At one level, this is a very odd reason for sticking with a precedent...

...This is crucial, because 35 years of Republican domination of the Court has not resulted in the overruling of a single revolutionary Warren Court decision—not Miranda v. Arizona, which imposed a new interrogation procedure on police departments across the country, not Griswold v. Connecticut, which began the constitutionalization of sexual freedom, not New York Times v. Sullivan, which turned the regulation of defamatory speech over to the courts, and not Brandenburg v. Ohio, which even in this age of terrorism continues to protect most advocacy of violence...

...By now it should go without saying that in attempting to keep the Constitution up-to-date, the justices have frequently shattered the established expectations of millions of Americans...

...Casey is concerned with the perception of legality more than the substance...

...If Roe were overturned, the country would, said the Court, pay a "terrible price...

...Those include cases prohibiting virtually all gender distinctions in the law, protecting homosexual sodomy, severely limiting public religious observances, and preventing states from regulating profanity...

...But the proposition that a state's interests before about the sixth month of pregnancy are not strong enough to justify prohibiting abortions or imposing substantial obstacles on abortions is not a legal principle at all...

...Whether the Court plays a saner role in our political system in the years ahead will depend in large measure on whether the justices can think realistically and critically about the practice of adhering to past decisions...

...Obviously, some things are more important than public reliance on judicial decisions...

...have less precedential force than Plessy v. Ferguson, which (as I have said) the Court is justly celebrated for overturning...

...Of course, these changes were underway before Roe was decided in 1973 and were surely caused by many other factors besides the Court's decision...

...And the abortion decisions, which were Specter's main concern, are bitterly contested, as is evident from the enactment of a federal partial-birth abortion ban and the recent South Dakota law prohibiting most abortions...

...The existence of this empirical basis for the claims made by the justices in Casey, however, does not justify the Court's insistence that overruling Roe would be understood by the public as a more radical revision of legal principle than was overruling the doctrine of separate but equal...

...Moreover, a reluctance to disrespect or to unsettle prior understandings is especially natural for someone with conservative instincts...

...Even on the assumption that abortion would be widely outlawed, the main consequences for women would be prospective, changing some decisions and attitudes and imposing some burdens...

...Reversing Roe would leave some of these women pregnant...

...In short, the most celebrated decision of our time did overrule an established legal principle upon which pervasive political expectations and moral understandings had been based...

...Pretend...

...Our very nationhood depends on it...

...Indeed, for all its high-toned references to the rule of law, the opinion is suffused with cynicism about the relationship between law and politics...

...Neither the need to honor announced principles nor the desire to protect entrenched expectations provides an explanation for giving the abortion decisions the status of super-precedents...

...And since when is a considered judgment that a constitutional ruling was profoundly wrong as a matter of law referred to as "a present doctrinal disposition to come out differently...

...More disturbingly, Casey does not exactly say that following the precedent set by Roe is important in order to convince the public that the Court is in fact abiding by legal principle...

...When asked about the weighty considerations discussed in Casey, nominee Alito replied blandly, "I think that the Court . . . should be insulated from public opinion...

...The Casey opinion begins by carefully laying out the essential aspects of Roe that it was declining to overrule...

...To an innocent mind, the fact that many people fervently think you are wrong might be a reason to suspect that perhaps you are wrong...

...The Roberts Court now faces not only Warren Court precedents but also, even putting the abortion issue aside, dozens of far-reaching precedents established during the Burger and Rehnquist eras...

...However, in important and highly celebrated instances, the Court has swept aside practices and understandings that had been validated by the Court's own prior decisions...

...There is, obviously, a cost in disturbing settled expectations...

...Even as Specter grilled Alito about the need to separate law and politics, the senator was engaged in a very public process in which politicians try to affect the direction the Court will take...

...Bowing to Precedent A decent respect for the Constitution should cause the Supreme Court to reconsider some past decisions BY ROBERT F. NAGEL At the outset of Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter asked a series of questions about the rather arcane subject of stare decisis, which is the judicial practice of following prior decisions...

...In fact, just prior to broaching the notion of a super-precedent, Specter asked whether Alito agreed that the Constitution embodies "the concept of a living thing" and that it "represents the values of a changing society...

...This displacement of political decision-making has had deeply harmful consequences for our society...

...Political fire, after all, is an indication that a significant number of people disagree with the Court's position on abortion...

...Consequently, reversing Roe might have no effect, or only minor effects, on women's expectations or behavioral patterns...

...But it is difficult to see how past decisions made in reliance on Roe would be affected...

...If there was any doubt about this broader meaning in 1954, it was quickly eliminated in the next few years as courts ordered the desegregation of public beaches, buses, golf courses, and bathhouses...

...At one point, for instance, it asserts that, because the usual reasons for overruling precedent do not apply to the original abortion decision, "the Court could not pretend to be reex-amining the prior law with any justification beyond present doctrinal disposition to come out differently from the Court of 1973...

...The Casey Court actually toys with (but dismisses) the possibility that some women might engage in unprotected sexual activity based on the expectation that they could obtain an abortion if necessary...

...Brown, now an acknowledged illustration of an unchallengeable precedent, began the destruction of a way of life that the Court itself had helped to put in place...

...That the legalistic fastidiousness of Casey should be invoked in a confirmation hearing is downright weird...

...The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives...

...About this, the Court declared without elaboration that "the required determinations fall within judicial competence...

...Courts] should do what the law requires in all instances...

...In contrast, the Court could have overruled Roe without reversing any constitutional or legal principle...

...Our current situation, then, is that the decision to overrule the separate but equal doctrine is the most celebrated legal event of the past century, while the decision establishing a right to abortion—the most legally dubious and controversial opinion of the 20th century—is an untouchable super-precedent...

...Casey, then, declined to overrule a legal principle established in the most criticized decision of our time only if the meaning of the term "legal principle" is stretched so far as to include moral conclusions about fiercely debated personal, political, medical, and spiritual questions...

...There are some cases that as a practical matter are not subject to reconsideration...

...Few of these professionals, however, would therefore describe the institution as illegitimate...

...It is a moral conclusion representing a judgment about the relative importance of what appear to be two entirely incommensurate interests, the individual interest of a woman in obtaining abortions and the interest of the state in regulating or prohibiting early-term abortions...

...To say the least, this deserves some reflection...

...One mentioned by Specter is that people order their affairs in reliance on judicial decisions...

...Alito parried this by declining to "get into categorizing precedents as super-precedents or super-duper precedents...