In an excellent front-page essay in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section, Yale law professor Akhil Amar, who (at the risk of understatement) is widely recognized as among the top handful of constitutional scholars, provides a robust defense of Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion in Dobbs. Amar, it’s worth noting, is a staunch liberal and explicitly identifies himself as “a Democrat who supports abortion rights but opposes Roe.”
Roe v. Wade is “ripe for reversal,” Amar explains, as it “lacks solid grounding in the Constitution itself, as Justice Alito demonstrates at length.” The “dire assessments” by many critics that the draft “would threaten a wide range” of other precedents “don’t stand up to scrutiny.” The “draft’s logic” distinguishes those other precedents in various ways and thus “reinforces” and “buttresses” them. Roe is also “decisively different … because, as Justice Alito’s draft opinion stresses, abortion uniquely involves destroying unborn human life.”
More broadly, there isn’t “anything unusual in the leaked draft’s treatment of precedent,” and “there is nothing radical, illegitimate, or improperly political in what Justice Alito has written.”