This is Rusty Reno with First Things magazine here in New York for another episode of our podcast, the editor's desk. And And with me today is Hadley Arcus, a sometime professor

of jurisprudence at Amherst College and founder, director of the James Wilson Institute.

And Hadley's here to talk about his March 22 article on overturning Roe.

Welcome to the podcast.

Oh, thanks.

Thanks for having me in, Rossi.

It's an honor to be with first things again.

Oh, well, it's great to have your piece.

And you, in this piece, it concerns the case before the Supreme Court, it has to do with a Mississippi

law that prohibits abortion after 15 weeks, the Dobbs case, and certainly those of us who

are concerned about the sanctity of life, we tend to fixate on the results of that the court

would love the course we want it to overturn Roe, but we neglect how the court reasons.

And that's really the light motif of your essay, is that a great deal turns on how the court

reasons.

Right. And that sense of how reasoned affects the question of how we understood what the result was that we're aiming for.

In the conventional conservative jurisprudence, the problem of Roe was that the courts exceeded its jurisdiction.

Abortion was mentioned nowhere in the text of the Constitution, therefore it was simply an exertion of raw judicial power for the court to say anything about the subject.

But of course, marriage is not mentioned in the Constitution for the court to say anything about the subject. Of course, marriage is not mentioned the Constitution before the courts struck down interracial

marriage, the ban on interracial marriage in Loving versus Virginia.

But for the conservatives, generally the real problem was simply the overextension of the court.

It's taken upon itself the authority to override the laws of the states.

But in this sense of the matter, the problem of Roe would be settled as soon as Roe was overturned and the question of abortion was

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