Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, said Tuesday that two landmark Supreme Court decisions legalizing abortion are “settled law.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, questioned Jackson on Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on her nomination to the high court, citing prior comments from Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
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Jackson replied that she agrees with the justices that “Roe and Casey are the settled law of the Supreme Court concerning the right to terminate a woman’s pregnancy.”
Roe and Casey, Jackson said, “established a framework that the court has reaffirmed, and in order to revisit, as Justice Barrett said, the Supreme Court looks at various factors, because stare decisis is a very important principle.”
That principle, Jackson said, “provides and establishes predictability, stability,” and “serves as a restraint in this way on the exercise of judicial authority, because the court looks at whether or not precedents are relied upon, whether they’re workable, in addition to whether or not they’re wrong, and other factors as well.”
Asked by Feinstein if Roe is a “superprecedent,” Jackson replied that all Supreme Court cases are binding and precedent is a factor the court considers when it does revisit cases.
Feinstein, a California Democrat who typically queries nominees to the Supreme Court on abortion, cited some exchanges with prior nominees in her questioning. Jackson’s answer was within the norm for Supreme Court nominees, who often simply acknowledge the precedent to steer away from questions about whether or not they would be willing to overturn the ruling in Roe, which remains a subject of controversy nearly 50 years after it was decided.
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The high court last year heard Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case concerning a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In its defense of the law, Mississippi directly asked the court to reconsider Roe and Casey, which some legal analysts and activists on both sides of the abortion debate say could prompt the court to reverse or scale back those decisions. The court’s decision in the case is expected this summer.
