Overturn Roe v. Wade

We write not to praise Anthony Kennedy's jurisprudence, but to bury it.

Across 31 years, Justice Kennedy issued many rulings, good and bad. But his most lasting legacy was the travesty he released 26 years ago today, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. With airy, mystical reasoning, unrooted in the Constitution, the common law, or the natural law, he talked himself into saving a precedent that was indefensible legally, scientifically, and morally.

In saving Roe v. Wade in 1992, Kennedy did violence to the rule of law, and undermined the court's legitimacy and added extra poison to our politics. Casey helped transform national politics into a winner-take-all partisan death match that, over a decade, saw both parties destroy the rules of the Senate. That's before mentioning that Casey condemned tens of millions of babies to death in the womb.

Politicians are already saying in so many words that replacing Kennedy is, more than anything else, about saving or scrapping Roe and Casey.

Most news media will portray Roe as a venerable precedent, but an honest discussion of these cases should begin with an admission of the near-universal judgment among legal scholars, not just those who oppose abortion, that Roe v. Wade was a jurisprudential embarrassment.

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