1990—In Hodgson v. Minnesota, the Court addresses the constitutionality of a Minnesota statute governing notice to parents when their daughters seek to undergo abortion, and the resulting mess yields this summary by the Court of the justices’ votes:
STEVENS, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, IV, and VII, in which BRENNAN, MARSHALL, BLACKMUN, and O’CONNOR, JJ., joined, an opinion with respect to Part III, in which BRENNAN, J., joined, an opinion with respect to Parts V and VI, in which O’CONNOR, J., joined, and a dissenting opinion with respect to Part VIII. O’CONNOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, post, p. 458. MARSHALL, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part, in which BRENNAN and BLACKMUN, JJ., joined, post, p. 461. SCALIA, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, post, p. 479. KENNEDY, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, in which REHNQUIST, C.J., and WHITE and SCALIA, JJ., joined, post, p. 480.
Justice Scalia’s one-paragraph opinion (citations omitted) succinctly captures the situation:
“As I understand the various opinions today: One Justice holds that two-parent notification is unconstitutional (at least in the present circumstances) without judicial bypass, but constitutional with bypass; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is constitutional with or without bypass; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is unconstitutional with or without bypass, though the four apply two different standards; six Justices hold that one-parent notification with bypass is constitutional, though for two different sets of reasons; and three Justices would hold that one-parent notification with bypass is unconstitutional. One will search in vain the document we are supposed to be construing for text that provides the basis for the argument over these distinctions, and will find in our society’s tradition regarding abortion no hint that the distinctions are constitutionally relevant, much less any indication how a constitutional argument about them ought to be resolved. The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled individual views make it increasingly evident, Term after Term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer’s—and hence not in the judge’s—workbox. I continue to dissent from this enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so.”
2008— By a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana invents a rule that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the death penalty for the crime of raping a child if the rape does not cause the child’s death. Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer join Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. The majority’s rule applies “no matter,” as Justice Alito puts it in his dissent, “how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be.” (The particular case before the Court involved an eight-year-old victim who suffered a gruesome internal laceration.)
While running for president, Barack Obama purports to oppose the ruling even as he commits to appoint the sort of justices who will disguise their own left-wing policy preferences as constitutional law.