Month: June 2020

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.

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The Chief Justice’s decision to concur in the judgment in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo illustrates the usual political phenomenology of conservatism as the alleged antithesis to the principles of the liberal revolutions. Jaime Balmes, one of the great Catholic political philosophers and theologians of the 19^th century, described the movement of all conservative political action in an 1844 article about the rise of moderate and conservative parties in Spain:

Continue reading “John Roberts, Conservative” →

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.

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A brief observation about the problems of judicial Burkeanism: In June Medical LLC v. Russo, the Chief Justice provided the decisive fifth vote to invalidate Louisiana abortion regulations, writing that the regulations were on all fours with similar Texas abortion regulations invalidated by a 5-3 vote four years ago in Whole Womens’ Health v. Hellerstedt. Although the Chief dissented in the earlier case, he claimed that his vote in June Medical was dictated by stare decisis. In the key passage of his concurrence in the judgment, the Chief appealed to the Burkean virtue of epistemic humility:

Continue reading “True and False Humility” →

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.

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In his appalling invocation of the principle of stare decisis in concurring with the United States Supreme Court’s overturning of a Lousiana statute meant to call abortionists’ bluff on the claim that killing babies is “health care,” Chief Justice John Roberts quotes a famous passage of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the deference due to the wisdom of the ages. Several commentators have protested at this abuse of Burke’s principle. Thus, Yuval Levin points out that Burke himself held that precedents should only hold when they fulfill certain conditions:

Continue reading “Edmund Burke and the Tragedy of Conservatism” →

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the Ius & Iustitium series on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo, striking down Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. The contributors to Ius & Iustitium will be offering short essays focusing on different aspects of the Court’s decision. A post collecting the essays will be published at the end of the series.

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The 5-4 decision in June Medical Services, L.L.C. v. Russo is bound to satisfy no one. On one hand, the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the four liberal Justices to overturn Louisiana’s abortion restrictions. On the other hand, Roberts’s opinion, which as the narrowest concurrence is at least presumptively the controlling opinion, narrowly decides the case and represents in some respects a repudiation of the approach taken in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. On the whole, though, it is hard to see this as anything other than a major defeat for pro-life activists. The scope of the defeat, however, may not be fully apparent. 

Continue reading “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool You” →