Tuesday, June 14, 2022

The Docket's Special Issue on Hobbs

The Docket, which is the digital sidekick to Law and History Review, has just posted a special issue prompted by the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.  As the editor, Gautham Rao, writes: 

An undercurrent in the tidal wave of commentary on the Dobbs draft has concerned Justice Alito’s historical analysis that serves as the foundation of his decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Constitutional law scholars such as Aziz Huq have explained: “For instance, the draft majority opinion spills a good deal of ink on the history of abortion regulation in England and the United States (skimming over, as it does it, the considerable periods in which abortion was left to the free choice of women).”

Here are the contents:

Editor’s Note: The Dobbs Special Issue

Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson: Roe v Wade and Feminism: The Limits of Public Memory

“Abortion Was a Crime”? Three Medievalists respond to “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.”

Felicity Turner: A View of Dobbs from the 19th Century

Alison Lefkovitz
: The Population Politics of Dobbs?

Dr. Deborah Dinner: Originalism and the Misogynist Distortion of History in Dobbs?

--Dan Ernst