1997—By a vote of 4-3, the California supreme court rules (in American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lungren) that a state law that requires a pregnant minor to obtain parental consent or judicial authorization before she obtains an abortion violates the state constitution.
In one dissent, longtime liberal justice Stanley Mosk charges that the justices in the majority, while purporting to apply the principle governing claims under the state constitutional right to privacy, in fact “reverse the principle, sub silentio.” In another, Justice Marvin Baxter argues that the majority “departs radically from any defensible view of the voters’ intent when they added a right of privacy to the [state constitution] in 1972 and undermines the fundamental and constitutionally protected right of parents to guide and control the upbringing of their children.” In the third, Justice Janice Rogers Brown concludes that the case “is an excellent example of the folly of courts in the role of philosopher kings.”