Steven Mazie Profile picture
Sep 13, 2021 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
NEW: Mississippi clinic has just filed its response brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org, the abortion case coming to SCOTUS this fall.
Clinic begins by urging the Court to dismiss the case due to the state’s possibly-not-kosher bait-and-switch: it pivoted to a frontal attack on Roe/Casey in the merits briefing after cert was granted
Brief then argues that overruling Roe/Casey would undermine the principle of stare decisis—the idea that the Supreme Court should stand by old precedents (“let the decision stand”)
In this vein, clinic argues that Roe is “embedded” in America’s “national culture” and (summoning Justice Ginsburg’s favored justification for abortion rights) is crucial for women’s equal participation in society.
Another key section of the brief: there is no obvious or plausible replacement for the viability line established in Casey (that no abortion prohibitions are constitutional prior to the fetus's ability to survive outside the womb)
More on viability...
The brief closes by highlighting the “chaos” and “upheaval” that would ensue if Roe were to be jettisoned, with the Texas abortion law as an example
And the closing lines set out the stakes: whether or not the Court explicitly overturns Roe/Casey, upholding Mississippi's 15-week ban will functionally bring an end to the constitutional right to abortion
The full brief is available here supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/1…
The "half-measures" would be fiddling with Roe/Casey to permit pre-viability bans w/o announcing those decisions dead.

Over the summer, @ProfMMurray and I predicted this may be what happens next spring. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

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More from @stevenmazie

Jun 14
This is one of the two big gun cases we've been expecting, and again it's a 6-3 decision along ideological lines.

The ATF under Donald Trump started regulating bump stocks as machine guns after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre.

Today SCOTUS says the govt can't do that.
Alito writes separately to say that Congress can change the law to allow bump stock regulation Image
Read 6 tweets
Apr 25
Kav on OLC opinions: clear statement rule for official acts, but none of these statutes in this case have a clear statement.

Kavanaugh seems REALLY INTERESTED IN EXPANDING PRESIDENTIAL POWER
Kav: some acts in indictment are private and some are official. Who decides which is which?

Sauer: the district court
Barrett: what if the criminal acts aren't discovered until after president leaves office? no chance for impeachment/conviction in Congress?

Sauer: better to under-enforce than "lose liberty"
Read 65 tweets
Apr 24
At 10 am, the Supreme Court hears its second abortion case in as many months. Have a look at my quick @TheEconomist preview and follow me here. I’ll be analyzing the oral argument as it happens espresso.economist.com/face3ee8cd23d4…
Here are the lawyers arguing today. The hearing is scheduled for one hour but, with additional questions in the justice-by-justice rounds, will probably take about two hours. Image
And we're off. Joshua Turner begins his defense of the Idaho Defense of Life Act that does not permit abortion in emergency settings unless the pregnant woman faces an imminent risk of death.
Read 78 tweets
Apr 22
SCOTUS just now in 8th am homelessness case: Justice Sotomayor, pressing lawyer for Grants Pass, OR, on why "stargazers" or people lying on the beach who fall asleep ("as I tend to do") are not arrested, but homeless people are.
Kagan: could you criminalize the status of homelessness?

lawyer: that's not a status

Kagan: yes it is
Kagan: you could criminalize just homelessness. I mean that's quite striking!

Lawyer: we do not do that.

Kagan: *could* you?

Lawyer: ...
Read 20 tweets
Mar 28
Looking back at the Joint Appendix in FDA v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, it's remarkable how slippery the anti-mife lawyers are as to whether their objection to "completing an abortion" is (1) killing a live embryo/fetus or also (2) removing dead pregnancy tissue.

🧵
Start w/ @Dahlialithwick and @mjs_DC's excellent piece highlighting Erin Hawley's pivot to (2): she transforms "'complicity' from a shield for religious dissenters to a sword for ideologues desperate to seize control over other people’s lives and bodies" slate.com/news-and-polit…
Yet when probed by Kagan in Tuesday's hearing for evidence that plaintiffs object to (2), she points to JA 155, graf 15. Image
Read 11 tweets
Mar 26
Today Erin Hawley said her clients face a "Hobson's choice" due to FDA rules regarding access to mifepristone: the agency "forces them to choose between helping a woman with a life-threatening condition and violating their conscience".

Here's why that's wrong...

A 🧵
What's a Hobson's choice? Wikipedia helps us out: a non-choice choice. When you are given two options and one is obviously better than the other so you don't, in fact, have a choice. Image
That's not what Hawley is saying about the choice facing her doctor-clients. She paints their choice as between two obviously bad options (1/let a woman suffer/die; 2/kill a fetus). That's more akin to a dilemma, which, as Wikipedia helpfully clarifies, is not a Hobson's choice. Image
Read 9 tweets

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