Tag Archives: Common law
Dobbs Sentences #118: Part II B 3
Paragraph 6 of 11 Sentence 4 of 4 This sentence has two claims that need some discussion: “That is not surprising since common-law authorities had repeatedly condemned abortion and described it as an ‘unlawful’ act without regard to whether it occurred before or after quickening. See supra, at 16–21.” The claims: The phrase that separates […]
Dobbs Sentences #116: Part II B 3
Paragraph 6 of 11 Sentence 2 of 4 This sentence contains three claims: “But the insistence on quickening was not universal, see Mills v. Commonwealth, 13 Pa., at 633; State v. Slagle, 83 N.C. 630, 632 (1880), and regardless, the fact that many States in the late 18th and early 19th century did not criminalize […]
Dobbs Sentences #99: Part II B 2 d
Paragraph 1 of 1 Sentence 2 of 3 Another sentence with a single claim: “On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.” This is too broad and vague to assess in the passing moment, so it’s undetermined.
Dobbs Sentences #86: Part II B 2 c
Paragraph 3 of 6 Sentence 2 of 4 Just one claim in the next sentence, but the citations attached to this sentence are an explosion of avenues for investigation: “During that period, treatise writers and commentators criticized the quickening distinction as ‘neither in accordance with the result of medical experience, nor with the principles of […]
Dobbs Sentences #64: Part II B 2 a
Paragraph 5 of 8 Sentence 1 of 5 The next paragraph opens with a sentence with two claims, one of which is the whole sentence “That the common law did not condone even pre-quickening abortions is confirmed by what one might call a proto-felony-murder rule.” The claims: This obviously introduces the next subject, and whatever […]
Dobbs Sentences #63: Part II B 2 a
Paragraph 4 of 8 Sentence 3 of 3 The sentence that ends this paragraph has two simple claims: “Similarly, an indictment from 1602, which did not distinguish between a pre-quickening and post-quickening abortion, described abortion as ‘pernicious’ and ‘against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity’.” Keown 7 (discussing R. v. […]
Dobbs Sentences #62: Part II B 2 a
Paragraph 4 of 8 Sentence 2 of 3 The next sentence is a single claim, and one we’ve already confirmed: “Quite to the contrary, in the 1732 case mentioned above, the judge said of the charge of abortion (with no mention of quickening) that he had ‘never met with a case so barbarous and unnatural.’28” […]
Dobbs Sentences #58: Part II B 2 a
Paragraph 3 of 8 Sentence 1 of 3 The next sentence indicates another pair of books that don’t lend themselves to easy access: “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime. See generally J. Dellapenna, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History 126, and […]
Dobbs Sentences #55: Part II B 2 a
Paragraph 1 of 8 Sentence 1 of 1 This next section starts to lay out the legal history of abortion in more specific terms—beginning hundreds of years before the founding of the United States: “We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after “quickening”—i.e., the first felt movement of […]
Dobbs Sentences #51: Part II B 1
Paragraph 2 of 3 Sentence 3 of 4 The third sentence in this paragraph is one claim, but it contains a couple more claims that are worth looking at independently. Here’s the sentence: “American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions.” A paradigm […]
Cynical Jason 