Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Supreme Court reporter, said in St. Louis last week that Justice Samuel Alito elaborately reinterpreted a 1990s precedent to “provide to a veneer of legal analysis on what is at its core a religious tract” overturning Roe v. Wade. Greenhouse added that the “metastasized precedent” Justice Alito created is now…
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade placed Carbondale at the heart of the abortion access debate. As conservative states across the Midwest and South swiftly moved to ban abortion, Illinois emerged as a refuge for people seeking access to reproductive care. Health care providers saw Carbondale, in particular, as an important…
Nina Totenberg told St. Louis audiences last week that the U.S. Supreme Court is the most conservative in 90 years and has lost legitimacy with many Americans. Totenberg has covered the court for the past half century, including more than four decades at NPR. She was speaking Oct. 13 to supporters of St. Louis Public…
When the great-grandmothers of today’s young women were born, women couldn’t vote. They were expected to be mothers and homemakers. When the grandmothers of today’s young women were born, women had no legal protections against discrimination in education, jobs or credit. The Supreme Court said “Equal Protection” in the 14th Amendment didn’t include women. When…
Is the Constitution dead or alive? The late Justice Antonin Scalia, long the chief advocate of originalism on the Supreme Court, was unequivocal. “The constitution that I interpret is not living but dead,” he said in a 2008 speech. His counterpart, the late Justice William J. Brennan Jr., intellectual leader of the Warren Court, was…