Dobbs and the Holdings of Roe and Casey

• Author: Eric R. Claeys
• Position: Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University; Member, James Madison Society, Princeton University
• Pages: 283-329

Dobbs and the Holdings of Roe and Casey

ERIC R. CLAEYS*

© 2022 Eric R. Claeys, eric.claeys@gmail.com. Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School, George

Mason University; Member, James Madison Society, Princeton University. I thank Helen Alvare

´, Sherif

Girgis, Gary Lawson, Robert Leider, Adam MacLeod, Julia Mahoney, and Ed Whelan for helpful

comments. I thank Sydney Dominguez and Daniel McNichol for excellent research assistance, and the

staff of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy for editing work above and beyond the call.

I clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist in the Supreme Court’s 1995–96 term. He was better

than any other lawyer I have ever worked with at organizing a legal argument—and at spotting holdings

and obiter dicta. This Article is dedicated to his memory.

ABSTRACT

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the State of Mississippi

has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned

Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Most observers believe that Dobbs fairly presents

the question whether Roe and Casey should be overruled, and most of the

Dobbs oral argument focused on that question. At oral argument, however,

Chief Justice John Roberts asked whether Roe and Casey might entitle women

only to a fair opportunity to obtain abortions during pregnancy. In the Chief

Justice’s trial theory, neither Roe nor Casey entitles women to obtain abortions

up through viability.

Since the trial theory was not raised in Dobbs until oral argument, it has not

been studied with the attention it deserves. This Article studies the theory, and it

does so with principles of jurisprudence about precedents. The Article studies

the precedential effects of Roe, Casey, and eleven other Court constitutional

abortion-rights decisions. The conventional wisdom restates those decisions

accurately. If Roe and Casey have precedential value, the statute under chal-

lenge in Dobbs is facially unconstitutional. The trial theory effectively rewrites

Roe and Casey; it makes them stand for propositions different from their hold-

ings.

The Article shows as much by demonstrating three more specific theses.

First, Roe held that a state law violates federal substantive due process if it pro-

hibits abortions pre-viability. Second, Roe also held that a state law is unconsti-

tutional on its face if it restricts pre-viability abortions in numbers that seem

substantial in relation to the post-viability abortions it could constitutionally

prevent. Third, those two holdings from Roe have been followed in Casey and

in eleven other federal substantive due process abortion cases.

Those theses do not determine how Dobbs should or will be decided. Justices

could still reaffirm Roe and Casey, they could still overrule those cases, or they

could rely on some other and even more untested rule of decision. But this

Article does rule out the trial theory. In the process, this Article supplies a more

systematic account than any other work to date of what Roe and Casey held.

Lawyers and judges often say that Roe and Casey both hold that states may not

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bar abortion before viability. This Article makes patent what such statements

leave latent—the specific constitutional law arguments of Roe and Casey, and

the principles of jurisprudence that settle which of those arguments were

holdings.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ON REAFFIRMING, OVERRULING, AND REWRITING

PRECEDENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

I. FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL ABORTION RIGHTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292

A. Substantive Due Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

B. Roe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

C. Casey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

D. Mainline Readings of Roe and Casey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

II. DOBBS AND THE TRIAL THEORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

A. The Dobbs Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

B. The Trial Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

C. Does the Trial Theory Reread or Rewrite Roe and Casey? . . 297

III. JURISPRUDENCE AND PRECEDENTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

IV. ROE’S JUDGMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

V. ROE’S HOLDINGS ABOUT CONSTITUTIONAL ABORTION RIGHTS .. . 303

A. Roe’s Holdings and the Rationes Decidendi Contributing to

Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303

B. The Abortion-Rights Holding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

C. The Police Powers Ratio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

D. The Maternal Health Dictum, and the Statute-Classifying

Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

E. The Viability Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

F. The Police Powers Application Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

G. Viability in Roe’s Abortion-Rights Holdings . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

284 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 20:283

VI. ROE’S OVERBREADTH HOLDING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

A. The Overbreadth Holding and the Rationes Decidendi

Contributing to It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

B. Overbreadth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

C. The Overbreadth-Abortion-Rights Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

D. The Overbreadth-Application Ratio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

E. Why an Overbreadth Holding Puts at Issue the Conduct of

Third Parties (and Not Just the Conduct of the Party

Challenging the Constitutionality of the Statute) . . . . . . . . . 313

F. The Viability Ratio Again, and Its Role in the Overbreadth

Holding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

VII. CASEY AND OTHER LATER SUPREME COURT ABORTION-RIGHTS

DECISIONS .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

A. Danforth v. Rogers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

B. Louisiana State Board of Examiners v. Rosen . . . . . . . . . . . 316

C. Doe v. Bolton—and the Extension of Roe’s Dicta About

Incidental Abortion Regulations to Maternal Health

Regulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

D. Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth . . . . . . 319

E. Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, and

Planned Parenthood of Kansas City v. Ashcroft. . . . . . . . . . 320

F. Bellotti v. Baird, Hodgson v. Minnesota, and the Extension

of Roe and Doe to Parental Consent Requirements . . . . . . . 321

G. Casey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322

H. Stenberg v. Carhart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

I. Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt and June Medical

Services v. Russo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

VIII. CASES UPHOLDING ABORTION REGULATIONS FROM

CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

IX. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

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