In a City Journal essay, law professor Joel Alicea (whose work I’ve had ample occasion to praise) soundly observes of the pending Dobbs case:
This, then, is the moment the conservative legal movement has fought to bring about. If the Court fails to overrule Roe, the ruling will likely shatter the movement, and while (under a proper conception of the judicial role) the potential effect of Dobbs on the conservative legal movement should be irrelevant to the outcome in that case, it would be a significant legacy of the Roberts Court if Dobbs brought an end to one of the most successful intellectual and political projects of the past half-century.
Alicea explores the “intellectual tensions within the conservative legal movement—present since its inception and now coming to the fore.” He identifies and discusses two major tensions. One is an “intra-originalist tension … between those who saw originalism as a means to achieving some other substantive end [most prominently, judicial restraint] and those for whom it was the only legitimate constitutional methodology.” The second tension involves “disagree[ment] about whether originalism rests on a sufficiently robust moral foundation.”
Alicea forecasts that the decision in Dobbs “will likely either increase those tensions to the point of rupture”—if, that is, the Court fails to overturn Roe—“or greatly alleviate them.” He bracingly warns:
If the Court fails to overrule Roe and Casey, there is a very good chance that [Adrian] Vermeule would become the most important intellectual figure in whatever succeeds the current conservative legal movement.