The Yale Law Journal

VOLUME
133
2023-2024
Collection

Doing History After Dobbs: Applications, Implications, and Critiques of Dobbs's Historical Methodology

Forum

Lessons from Lawrence: How “History” Gave Us Dobbs—And How History Can Help Overrule It

Aaron Tang

Twenty years ago, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick by correcting Bowers’s mistaken historical assertions. History, as they say, repeats itself: When a future Court reconsiders Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it will find an opinion whose historical e…

Forum

The History of History and Tradition: The Roots of Dobbs's Method (and Originalism) in the Defense of Segregation

Reva B. Siegel

In Dobbs, the Court reversed Roe, interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment by counting states that banned abortion in 1868, an interpretive method popularized in the defense of segregation. This Essay traces the method’s spread, evolution, and justifications through decades of debate about originalism,…

Forum

The History of Neutrality: Dobbs and the Social-Movement Politics of History and Tradition

Mary Ziegler

By excavating the history around the history-and-tradition test used in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the alternative it pushes to the side, this Essay reconsiders the meaning—and plausibility—of neutrality claims turning on the Dobbs Court’s use of history and tradition.