Media Mentions

Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, 80, is a professor emeritus at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1968, counting among his former students Barack…

A looming Supreme Court challenge to California’s hog confinement standards implicates a wide array of environmental and other state laws, a Harvard Law School program…

Democrats have pulled off a quiet first in their just-passed legislation addressing climate change and health care: the creation of a tax on stock buybacks,…

After the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie during a Friday event in western New York, key questions about the suspect — who was charged with…

Donald Trump hadn’t even taken office before Attorney General Maura Healey vowed to fight him in court. In a November 2016 fund-raising appeal to supporters,…

In May 2007, fanfiction and traditionally published author Naomi Novik wrote a post on LiveJournal. “We are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and…

Retired Judge Nancy Gertner shared her thoughts on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s address on the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, unpacking some of the legal statutes involved…

Grocery stores are reducing their use of labels such as “best by” and “sell by,” which many customers don’t understand, in an effort meant to…

A Massachusetts police officer and his brother, an electrical contractor, were indicted last week for exchanging cash bribes and gifts for more than $36 million in contracts from an energy efficiency program in Massachusetts. Energy consumers in the state pay mandatory surcharges to fund Mass Save, a public-private program that is sponsored by gas and electric companies in partnership with the state’s Department of Energy Resources. Those funds help to cover the costs of energy efficiency upgrades to residential and commercial buildings. ... Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School, said that the alleged fraud scheme did not seem to be the result of an inherent aspect of the Mass Save public-private partnership. “These things happen in the utility world as they do in other sectors,” Peskoe told E&E News. “That’s not a reason to do these programs, it’s just the nature of this criminal activity that folks are looking for opportunities.

An article by Ashley Nunes: With the midterm elections coming, Democrats are trying to push through key legislative priorities — including renewing the child tax credit (CTC), which gives working parents a credit for each child and will expire in December 2025. No one doubts that it will be renewed; the credit has broad bipartisan public support. But what will it look like? That’s less clear. In general, Democrats want an expansive version that sends funds to parents in poverty, as was true briefly during the pandemic; Republicans want to return to a more restrictive version that gives working parents a lower tax bill — which means that people who don’t owe taxes don’t get the benefit. But in January, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) refused to support the expanded version in the Build Back Better social spending bill, which meant the bill couldn’t pass an evenly divided Senate.

Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court’s best-known decision of the last 50 years, is also its most endangered precedent. It gave women nationwide the legal right to choose abortion, but the backlash reshaped the country’s politics. The landmark ruling may well be overturned by conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents to do just that. What went wrong with Roe? Why did the court’s effort to resolve the abortion controversy in 1973 lead instead to decades of division? ... “The first-trimester/second-trimester dividing line is a big deal,” said Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman. “It’s why ‘partial-birth’ abortion laws were such a political gold mine for Republicans. Roe created such a broad abortion right that it probably pushed some of the many Americans in the middle of the spectrum on this issue into the opposition.”

An op-ed by Mary Ziegler: Something fundamental about the Supreme Court has changed in recent months. It is not simply that the Court has a conservative supermajority, although that is true enough. What is really striking is just how emboldened that conservative supermajority is—how willing to take on a number of deeply divisive culture-war issues; how blasé about making major decisions via the Court’s shadow docket; how open to making rapid, profound changes to long-standing precedent. Last night, when Politico released a leaked February draft of an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that would reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, the public got its most arresting taste thus far of just what this conservative bloc could do.

For nearly half a century, Republicans have railed against “unelected judges” making rulings that they claim disenfranchise voters from deciding for themselves what laws should govern hot-button issues. But since the release this week of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the long-standing constitutional right to abortion, Democrats have been the ones embracing that complaint, flipping the script as the party vents its frustration with elements of the U.S. system that have empowered a minority of the country’s voters to elect lawmakers who have successfully reshaped the high court. ... “Through most of U.S. history, there has been a shared stake among elite political actors in preserving the Supreme Court as an institution that is held out as being separate from and above politics,” said Richard H. Fallon Jr., a Harvard Law School professor. He said he sees that tradition eroding. “Certainly at no point in my lifetime,” Fallon said, “has the Supreme Court been more vulnerable than it is right now.”

The leak of a draft majority opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, was an unprecedented breach in a process typically shrouded in secrecy and a blow to the nation’s highest court, which in recent years has been plagued by questions about its impartiality from both the left and the right. In a statement released Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the authenticity of the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, but insisted that it was not final. He called the leak a “singular and egregious breach” and said that he has directed the marshal of the court to investigate its source. The Gazette spoke with Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, about the leak, how it might have happened, and what it could mean for the court’s reputation and the outcome of the case. The interview was edited for clarity and length.

In May 1987, Attorney General Edwin Meese III traveled to St. Louis and spoke before a group of clergy members opposed to abortion. Denouncing Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on abortion rights, he told them that he saw reason to hope that “in our lifetimes” it would be thrown on “the ash heap of legal history.” Thirty-five years later, a leaked draft opinion suggests that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn Roe, permitting states to outlaw abortion. Liberals may be aghast, but for the conservative legal movement, of which Mr. Meese was a key early figure, a long-sought moment of triumph appears to be at hand. “This will feel like a tremendous vindication for the conservative legal movement,” said Mary Ziegler, a Harvard Law School visiting professor and the author of several books about the anti-abortion movement and legal politics. “The movement goes beyond Roe v. Wade, but overruling it has become the preoccupation for the movement and the test of its success.”

Abortion may soon become illegal in some states. Politico on Monday night leaked a draft opinion penned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito suggesting the court will overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case legalizing abortion nationwide, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld abortion in 1992. The rare Supreme Court leak regards Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case surrounding a restrictive Mississippi abortion law. Judge Nancy Gertner, a retired judge for the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, said the news caught her off guard. “I was surprised by the venom of the decision,” Gertner said on Boston Public Radio. If the official ruling holds true to the arguments in the leaked document, it could have far-reaching effects beyond abortion. Gertner said she is worried about the broader legal implications, including what it means for birth control, interracial marriage and same-sex marriage. “The implications of that are enormous,” Gertner said. “The reasoning really casts doubt on 50 years of constitutional law.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Nobody will soon forget where they were when they got Monday’s news: The right of women to control their own bodies and to decide whether and when to have a child will no longer belong to them if the leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade becomes law this summer. But there is more. Reading the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, you quickly learn that all the rights people have long taken for granted — like the rights to decide whom to marry, whether to use birth control, with whom to have sex, how to raise your children, and an endless list of other freedoms — will no longer be protected unless you can point to language in the Constitution expressly guaranteeing those rights, or convince five Supreme Court justices that they are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”

A day after a Supreme Court document on abortion became public we look at the legal and political implications. Marcia Coyle, chief Washington correspondent for the National Law Journal, and Mary Ziegler, a Florida State University law professor and author of "Abortion and the Law in America," join Judy Woodruff to discuss.

Coming up on today's show: Politico published a leaked document that appears to be written by Supreme Court Justice Alito, and shows the court will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Mary Ziegler, professor at Florida State University College of Law, currently a visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard and the author of Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020), talks about what this means and what comes next for abortion rights in America.

The bombshell draft opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and leaked to Politico shatters a bedrock of modern American law and could culminate a decades-long campaign by conservatives determined to reverse the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. Legal experts suggest the decision by the court’s conservative majority, which is not yet final, portends a flood of antiabortion laws across the country and could erode federal rights to same-sex marriage and access to contraceptives. ... Charles Fried, a constitutional law professor at Harvard and the United States solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, has long criticized the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. “There are two stunning weaknesses in Roe: its focus on the right to privacy and its historical survey of abortion practice in the United States,” said Fried in an interview Tuesday. But Fried, who argued against the constitutional right to abortion before the Supreme Court in 1989, said the 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey gave the Roe ruling a firmer constitutional basis. If Roe was a new house built on a shaky foundation, then Casey was the reinforcement that added support beams.

A leaked draft opinion suggests the US Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide, according to a Politico report released Monday. A decision to overrule Roe would lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states and could have huge ramifications for this year’s elections. But it’s unclear if the draft represents the court’s final word on the matter — opinions often change in ways big and small in the drafting process. ... “This will feel like a tremendous vindication for the conservative legal movement,” said Mary Ziegler, a Harvard Law School visiting professor and the author of several books about the anti-abortion movement and legal politics. “The movement goes beyond Roe v. Wade, but overruling it has become the preoccupation for the movement and the test of its success.”