Writing in this week’s NLJ, however, David Locke, partner, Hill Dickinson, contends there has been a ‘gross lack of understanding of law and process’ in the coverage of the case. He further argues the case has been exploited for political purposes.
He highlights potential motivations for the leak―so the resultant outrage would sway the judges, and to create a rallying point for the Democratic Party support base―and suggests a more proper reaction would have been to ‘wait for the ruling and then seek to codify the law at a federal level, or to campaign for appropriate State level protection… not to undermine the integrity of the Supreme Court’.
Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization concerns the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law banning abortion after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Mississippi law has so far been prevented from coming into force by injunctions based on the Supreme Court decision in Casey, which prevents states from banning abortions within the first 24 weeks. Trigger laws, which are primed to apply as soon as Roe v Wade is overturned, are in place in 13 US states, and would automatically make most abortions illegal in the first and second trimesters. A further nine states never repealed their pre-Roe anti-abortion laws.
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