As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Paragraph 2 of 8

Sentence 1 of 2

The next paragraph starts out with a simple claim, but the citation goes in an odd direction:

“The ’eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),’ Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U.S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal.”

The claim, as I said, is simple: a group of people all described abortion in the same way. Seems like the citation embedded in the sentence in which that claim is made would lead us to a passage in which those people described abortion in that way. That’s not what happens here. The passage indicated in Kahler is this one:

“Under well-settled precedent, a state rule about criminal liability—laying out either the elements of or the defenses to a crime—violates due process only if it ‘offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.’ Leland v. Oregon, 343 U.S. 790, 798 (1952) (internal quotation marks omitted). Our primary guide in applying that standard is ‘historical practice.’ Montana v. Egelhoff, 518 U.S. 37, 43 (1996) (plurality opinion). And in assessing that practice, we look primarily to eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like), as well as to early English and American judicial decisions. See, e.g., id., at 44–45; Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197, 202 (1977).

The passage doesn’t establish that any of those “eminent common-law authorities” wrote about abortion in any particular way, but that the people in question are acknowledged as “eminent common-law authorities” in Kahler. The Kahler opinion was authored by Justice Elena Kagan in 2019, so I’m guessing that the Dobbs Court is drawing attention to the fact that the authorities they will be citing are the same authorities held in such high regard by one of the authors of the dissent to this decision.

Just a guess.

In any case, the cited passage does not support the claim about the earlier figures’ descriptions of abortion after quickening, so this claim is undetermined:

• “The ’eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like)’ [. . .] all describe abortion after quickening as criminal.”