An Outsider's Perspective on Dobbs
It's illuminating to see the aftershocks in other Western countries
It is safe to say that the Dobbs opinion has kicked over the wasps’ nest. And yes, the wasps are furious.
I found this article to be extremely enlightening. The author, Leonid Sirota, is part of, I believe, a Canadian legal duo who blog about Canadian constitutional matters. This article looks at Dobbs — and, more particularly, the Dobbs meltdown — from an external perspective. The decision itself doesn’t bother him all that much, although he frankly admits that if he were to write his own constitution, he’d include abortion rights. He is agnostic on whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution really contains a right to an abortion or not. Because, as he makes clear in his article, that ultimately isn’t the point.
No, what bothers him is the outright misrepresentation of what courts do, what judges do, and what the Rule of Law itself means. And he lays the blame largely at the feet of those who are supposed to really understand the deep meaning of Law: the lawyers themselves.
Let me note that this criticism does not mean that I am convinced Dobbs was correctly decided. I do not know enough about the original meaning of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution to say whether it was. And to a large extent, this will be my point: one has to know the law before saying that judicial decision was wrong, let alone implying that it was political or indeed corrupt, as many have done.
And later:
I strongly suspect that a great many people, including, most regrettably, lawyers (including those of the academic and journalistic varieties) are themselves taking an entirely political approach to law.
He’s being generous. I would describe it as follows: the lawyers, the bar associations, and the law academy’s universal condemnation of Dobbs is a vast projection. The Supreme Court isn’t comprised of partisan hacks, but almost everyone in the bar and legal academy are. This ought to explain why we see the incoherent, frenzied and bizarre reactions in the following video.
I think our society is toast. We’re done. We’re over the cliff. Now, we turn to the task of maintaining, in our familial and small community silos, what smatterings of civilizational gleanings we can store up for the long struggle ahead of us.