This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.

In recent years, Jonathan Mitchell has become a crucial figure in the anti-abortion movement.

He was the architect of Texas's SB8 legislation, which allows individuals to sue other people

for helping to facilitate an abortion, acts like driving a patient to an appointment.

The law was novel in how it protected itself from review by the Supreme Court,

and some of its opponents have called it state-sponsored vigilantism.

Today's ruling by the five most conservative justices on the court,

the Texas Law, known as SB8, which has effectively banned almost all abortions in the state

for 101 days, can remain in effect for now.

SB8 empowers private citizens, not government officials, to enforce the abortion ban

by bringing private lawsuits.

Jonathan Mitchell, who conceived SB8, is now representing a man seeking millions of dollars

in civil damages from friends of his ex-wife, who helped her access abortion medication.

The women named in the case have countersued.

But despite his conservatism and his role in anti-abortion politics,

Mitchell has something in common with legal thinkers on the left,

a critique of the Supreme Court, and its extraordinary powers.

And he has ideas about how to chip some of that power away.

Mitchell rarely gives interviews, but he agreed to speak with the New Yorker's legal correspondent,

Jeannie Suk Gerson.

Jeannie is a professor at Harvard Law School, and clerked for Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court.

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