William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Abstract
What follows here describes and criticizes the modern liberal and conservative approaches to substantive due process. Part I shows how substantive due process came about in the mid-twentieth century as the union of two extant doctrines: incorporation and fundamental rights. Part II then describes how modern conservatism used the doctrine to arrive at the deeply rooted-in-history-and-tradition test and shows the deliberate reconfiguration of the jurisprudence during the latter twentieth century into the novel patchwork of the modern-conservative method applied in Dobbs. Part III offers a contrast, describing and explaining the traditional due-process analysis of medieval origin and the concept of ordered liberty it actualized. We are invited to juxtapose the deviant jurisprudence of the moderns against the tradition of reasoned judgment, and to imagine our recurring to the tradition from which America’s highest court has broken.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.
Repository Citation
Matthew W. Lunder, Understanding Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization: How the Modern Supreme Court Broke from Tradition and Changed the Original Meaning of Due Process, 33 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 1189 (2025), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol33/iss4/6Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Legal History Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons