In Frightened: A Legal Historian's View from 2022, ASLH Honorary Fellow Linda K. Kerber comments on Dobbs in AHA Perspectives. Here’s an excerpt:
All I have written and taught in more than 50 years as a historian has rested on bedrock assumptions: that the constitutional grounding under social change has been stable; that with a handful of exceptions—Dred Scott, Plessy, Lochner, the moment when FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court—constitutional interpretation has expanded with modern change. I required students in my classes to memorize the first section of the 14th Amendment, including the provision that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (Note that it does not read “citizen,” but “person.”) I emphasized that long after they had forgotten the specifics of the class, they will still be able to lean on this guarantee of equal protection to all persons, and I sent them out to be good citizens in the civic world of which they are a part.
But suddenly that view of our history has turned hopelessly romantic.
--Dan Ernst
