What Alito Got Right

Sign up for David’s newsletter, The Third Rail, here.

We do not know if Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health represents the current consensus of a majority of the Supreme Court. We certainly don’t know yet if it’s a preview of the Court’s actual ruling. Decisions are not final until opinions are issued, and dramatic history exists of a Supreme Court justice changing his mind on abortion during deliberations. In 1992, reported that Justice Anthony Kennedy initially voted to reverse when deciding but later switched his vote to affirm , “a flip attributed in court circles to liberal constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe’s pulling strings backstage.”