This link will send you to a debate between two of the smartest law professors there are, Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson. Sandy suggests the time has come for liberals to dump Roe, that it allows Republicans to motivate their base without making the issue salient enough to suburbanites that they’ll turn out en masse for Democrats. Unlike me, Sandy isn’t much convinced that there is an authentically “constitutional” problem with Roe–just that it’s bad politics. This is a debate worth having, although mainly so that liberals will accept what is coming at them regardless of whether they want it or not.
Author: Steven M. Teles
Steven Teles is a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of American Politics. He is the author of Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas), and co-editor of Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy (Cambridge). He is currently completing a book on the evolution of the conservative legal movement, co-editing a book on conservatism and American Political Development, and beginning a project on integrating political analysis into policy analysis. He has also written journal articles and book chapters on international free market think tanks, normative issues in policy analysis, pensions and affirmative action policy in Britain, US-China policy and federalism. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, Holy Cross, and Hamilton colleges, and been a research fellow at Harvard, Princeton and the University of London.
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