By William H. Freivogel 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
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
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has resulted in the steepest drop in respect for the U.S. Supreme Court in almost a century – the steepest since the Roosevelt court packing crisis of 1937. James L. Gibson, a political science professor at Washington University and national expert on the subject, wrote in September
We need to talk about abortion as self-defense. Terminating a pregnancy as an act of self-defense has been missing from the public conversation, despite media saturation with all manner of news and viewpoints about abortion—from the unprecedented leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion to the striking defeat of an anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas
