Welcome to the Federalist Radio Hour. This is Molly Hemingway. I'm senior editor at the Federalist, and I'm joined today by Carrie Severino, who is my co-author on Justice on Trial.

Our book on the Kavanaugh Confirmation and the future of the Supreme Court and the head of the Judicial Crisis Network.

And it is a wonderful person to talk about today's news, which is the Dobs case, which is going to be heard at the Supreme Court this week.

Thank you for being here, Carrie.

Great to be here, Molly.

And maybe you can just start by telling us about the Dobs case and what specifically on the line with the Dobs case.

Yeah, this case has to do with a law passed in Mississippi that effectively limits abortion to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

And it does include an exception for if there's a actual medical emergency on the part of the mother, but generally speaking, it is limited to the first 15 weeks.

Now, most people, I think the vast majority of abortions would happen before that, and most people, by that point, is when you're able to go in and see an actual child on the ultrasound.

So I think that the practical question of the timing of this law is actually something that hits where a lot of Americans are on abortion, which is that they would rather see it limited to earlier phases.

However, the law has a big problem legally, which is that under the current interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, you cannot as a state limit abortions before the age of viability, which is really more than in the early 20 week range.

And it's of course because that's a scientific question and not really a legal question, that's sort of a malleable standard, you know, at the time when the Planned Parenthood versus Casey decision came down in 1992 that set out viability as a standard that you can't legislate before.

The age of viability was a little different, it keeps moving up because our technology is better, but the key takeaway is, Mississippi's law as moderate as it is on abortion is running headlong into the current Supreme Court precedent.

And so this is an opportunity for the court to really reconsider that precedent and question, it is Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey, the case that really kind of reinterpreted Roe in it, but while upholding.

It's core decision that that abortion has to be protected under the Constitution re re really reconsidering those two cases.

Okay, so actually let's go ahead and talk a little bit about Roe and a little bit about Casey.

I know that you are a former clerk at the Supreme Court, you know these issues really well, and a lot of people are familiar with the names of those decisions and even what they're largely about, but could you kind of take us back to 1973 when Roe was decided and explain what it set out and then also what happened with the Casey decision.

Yeah, so Roe was this watershed case because it found for the first time in American history that there is apparently a right to have an abortion hidden somewhere in the Constitution.

And I say hidden because there is no text, of course, the Constitution that talks about abortion and the Constitution itself contemplates that everything that's not given to the federal government as an authority or prohibited to the states by the Constitution or its later amendments is something that states can legislate on.

And of course, and for all of American history states have been legislating on abortion in most cases forbidding abortions.

So it clearly was never something that's in the text the Constitution was never understood to be part of the Constitution or any of its amendments.

But then in 1973, the court by finding emanations from penumbres of other rights decided well there's a right to privacy in the Constitution, you know coming from things like the right against search and seizure and things like that.

...