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

Paragraph 3 of 6

Sentence 3 of 3

The paragraph ends with two claims:

“License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of ‘liberty,’ but it is certainly not ‘ordered liberty’.”

The claims:

• “License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of ‘liberty.’”
• “License to act on the basis of such beliefs [. . .] is certainly not ‘ordered liberty’.”

The first claim is true in the sense that it’s just a basic definition of “liberty”:

• “License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of ‘liberty.’”

The word “license” is curious, though, because elsewhere the Court has drawn a distinction between “license” and “liberty.” I must not have needed to quote any passages regarding that distinction, though, so I can’t find it at the moment. Something else to keep an eye out for.

The second claim will take more work:

• “License to act on the basis of such beliefs [. . .] is certainly not ‘ordered liberty’.”

I can’t think of a reason why this kind of freedom wouldn’t fit into a scheme of ordered liberty, and nothing in this decision so far has demonstrated that, so whatever justification the Court provides for this claim must be coming up.

Also, I peeked ahead, and it looks like the next paragraph expands on this point, so I’ll mark this undetermined until we can look at that.

So for now we have one true claim:

• “License to act on the basis of such beliefs may correspond to one of the many understandings of ‘liberty.’”

And one undetermined claim:

• “License to act on the basis of such beliefs [. . .] is certainly not ‘ordered liberty’.”