I’ve heard rave reviews about Judge Raymond Randolph’s speech to the Federalist Society on Friday night (he gave this year’s Barbara Olson lecture). The Chicago Tribune’s Jan Greenberg covers the speech today in her Alito-abortion piece:

The application surfaced as conservatives were touting a never-before-seen 1970 draft opinion by prominent federal appeals Judge Henry Friendly that firmly rejected a constitutional right to abortion, and that the conservatives said could change the terms of the abortion debate.
Friendly, one of the nation’s leading legal thinkers who died in 1986, was a mentor to Roberts, his former clerk. It was Friendly, Roberts’ friends and colleagues said, who was the leading influence on Roberts’ legal analysis and writing – even more so than his other former boss, Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In court papers and, later, in his appeals court opinions, Roberts often referred to Friendly’s writings on the law.
Federal appeals court Judge Raymond Randolph presented Friendly’s previously unknown opinion in a speech Friday at the annual convention of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group. The opinion, concerning the constitutionality of a New York abortion law, was never published because the state legislature changed the law in the middle of the case.
Randolph, who was clerking for Friendly at the time, retained a copy but kept it out of public view for 35 years. In the speech, Randolph read lengthy excerpts of the opinion, which he said “have such an important bearing on the Supreme Court’s continuing struggle with the problems he identified so long ago.”
In the opinion, Friendly flatly rejected the idea that a right to privacy was enshrined in the Constitution that would prohibit legislatures from passing abortion regulations, and he argued that the issue of abortion should be up to state legislatures, not judges.
Friendly also forecast a litany of problems if courts were to referee abortion debates. “The decision what to do about abortion is for the elected representatives of the people, not for three, or even nine, appointed judges,” Friendly wrote in the draft opinion.
Conservatives said the Friendly opinion provides an important framework for discussing legal opposition to Roe. They hope some of the thinking in the draft will be seized upon by the newly reconstituted Supreme Court as it re-examines the abortion issue in coming years.