Retired Justice Stephen Breyer believes the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade two years ago marked a “deeply regressive feature” of the approach to law taken by the high court’s Republican-appointed majority, according to his new book.
Breyer, 85, was an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who retired in 2022, just days after the pivotal Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that held states can enact their own laws restricting or limiting abortion access, a 6-3 ruling led by the Republican-appointed majority.
The justice’s new book Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism laid out his argument critiquing the “originalism” jurisprudence often adhered to by Republican-appointed judges to interpret the Constitution.
“In Dobbs, the majority’s reasoning boiled down to one basic proposition: Because the people who ratified the original Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment did not understand the document to protect reproductive rights, the document could not be read, now, as protecting those rights,” Breyer wrote, noting that the landmark abortion case “highlights a deeply regressive feature of the originalist approach.”
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