While Thomas said that he agreed that nothing in the Roe-related ruling Friday 'should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion. Thomas said the idea that the constitutional clause that guarantees only 'process' for depriving a person of life, liberty or property cannot be used 'to define the substance of those rights.' That is the tack conservative lawmakers took in multiple states, where for years they passed restrictive abortion laws in the hopes that a challenge to them would reach the Supreme Court and open the door for federal abortion rights to be overturned as a result.
Thomas' recommendation to reconsider that trio of decisions does not have the force of legal precedent, nor does it compel his colleagues on the Supreme Court to take the action he suggested.īut it is an implicit invitation to conservative lawmakers in individual states to pass legislation that might run afoul of the Supreme Court's past decisions, with an eye toward having that court potentially reverse those rulings. Hodges, which said there is a right to same-sex marriage.
Texas, which in 2003 established the right to engage in private sexual acts and the 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling in which the Supreme Court said married couples have the right to obtain contraceptives Lawrence v.
