« Nomenclature | Main | SCOTUS denies interim relief in SB8 litigation (Updated) »

Wednesday, September 01, 2021

SB8 and New York Times v. Sullivan

Mary Ziegler (Florida State) describes SB8 as the culmination of a decades-long strategy, centered in Texas, to use civil litigation to end abortion.

Ziegler reinforces our argument that current events around abortion in Texas recall events around pro-civil-rights speech in Alabama in the early 1960s. Alabama officials developed a coordinated plan to use civil defamation litigation under wildly pro-plaintiff state law to silence pro-civil-rights speech by civil rights activists and the Northern press. By the early 1960s, the New York Times faced $ 300 million in defamation judgments, prompting it to pursue the case to SCOTUS and ultimately change the First Amendment.

The difference, of course, is that SCOTUS in 1964 would interpret the First Amendment to end that strategy. Reproductive-rights activists and providers fear, probably rightly, that SCOTUS will not interpret the Fourteenth Amendment to end that strategy. But that shows that the concerns and complaints about SB8 are substantive rather than procedural--the current Court believes that states can ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and so will allow enforcement of that law.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on September 1, 2021 at 09:14 PM in Civil Procedure, Constitutional thoughts, First Amendment, Howard Wasserman, Judicial Process | Permalink

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.