Kagan Sees Threats to Everyday Rights Beyond Abortion

The justice said the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Dobbs case called into question access to contraception as well as gay and interracial marriage.

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Justice Elena Kagan also spoke about the Supreme Court’s long-running ethics controversies and efforts to address them.

Justice Elena Kagan said on Monday that Americans were right to worry about the future of rights that form the fabric of their everyday lives — such as access to contraception and interracial and gay marriage — since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

Justice Kagan said that in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, her colleagues had overturned the right to abortion with a historical argument that American women had not been free to have the procedure earlier in the nation’s history.

“That’s the entirety of the majority’s reasoning,” she said during a talk at New York University School of Law. “Then you say the same thing for contraception. Then you can say the same thing for interracial marriage. Then you could say the same thing for gay marriage.”

“I don’t think you’re overreading the bigger question,” she told Melissa Murray, a law professor who interviewed Justice Kagan and asked how far the logic of the Dobbs decision could go.

During the hourlong exchange, on Justice Kagan’s home turf of New York City, she described the importance of storytelling as a legal tool, trying to limit emergency cases and the gender dynamics on a court that now has four female members. (She said that made little substantive difference in the law, but was a powerful public statement about female authority.)

But her most emphatic remarks were about the legacy of Dobbs, as well as the court’s long-running ethics controversies and efforts to address them.

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