On October 2, 2023, Stockton University hosted its annual Constitution Day in the Campus Center Event Room. The event is designed to celebrate the U.S. Constitution while dissecting important constitutional issues. This year, the Constitution Day committee invited Melissa Murray, professor of law at NYU and graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale Law School, who clerked for Sonia Sotomayor. During her presentation, Murray examined the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling and how it has larger implications for laws outside of women’s reproductive rights. She also explored how a series of anti-democratic decisions surrounding voting and redistricting are being passed by the courts to make it more difficult for the political and judicial spheres to reflect the views of the majority.

The event was opened by Lauren Balasco, co-chair of the 2023 Constitution Day Planning Committee, who thanked the committee for all of their hard work in preparing for this event before handing off opening remarks to Joe Bertolino, President of the University.

Bertolino expressed his excitement to attend his first Stockton Constitution Day and the importance of active civic engagement, not just from students, but also from higher education. He expressed, “As the times change and technology advances, and misinformation moves quicker, it is imperative that we in higher education provide the spaces for difficult conversations to transpire. Colleges and Universities like Stockton have the responsibility to look at issues from all sides, to provide well-researched and accurate information, to allow for important dialogues to occur, and to extend grace to all viewpoints for each voice to be heard.”

He went on to say, “There are some topics that some of us would like to leave untouched, unexamined, ignored. There are some topics that you may think, ‘I don’t think I can have a productive conversation about that.’ But ignoring issues does not mean they cease to exist; ignoring the issue does not solve any problems, and ignoring the issue does not lead to growth. Character is built in the difficult conversations, in the uneasiness of gathering information, in the nerve-wracking task of hearing the sometimes harsh realities our friends and neighbors face,” Bertolino said as he went on to introduce the keynote speaker, Melissa Murray.

Murray opened by examining the court decisions that came before Dobbs, addressing the passing of Roe v. Wade and the significance of the court decisions that came after that affirmed a woman’s right to abortion as consistent with the right to bodily autonomy and the right to equality.

Murray expressed her wishes for the purpose of this lecture: “I wish to interrogate Dobbs’s claims to vindicate principles of democracy. I will examine this opinion’s reliance on this narrative of disrupted democratic deliberation and the intellectual pedigree of that argument.” This also includes understanding what the Dobbs decision will mean for the future of reproductive freedom.

As she critically pointed out: “On this account, Dobbs purports to return the abortion question to the people at precisely the moment when the court’s own actions have ensured that the political landscape is unlikely to produce genuine deliberation or to yield truly democratic outcomes.” Here, she is referring to the effects of redistricting and voting restrictions.

Murray then went on to describe the early opposition to Roe and the different ways in which the judicial system of the 70s set the framework to undermine abortion without outright banning it. Thus, setting the building blocks for the Dobbs decision.

“And so, abortion opponents adopted new strategies. Strategies that would be more palatable for the public, for fetal personhood, and for the prospect of abolishing it entirely. One strategy championed by a young enterprising justice department lawyer named Samuel A. Velito involved chipping away at abortion access through regulations that made abortion increasingly difficult, expensive, or logistically complicated both to provide and to access. The second strategy landed squarely in the ring of democratic deliberation. And it focused on the idea that Roe had involved impermissible judicial overreach and that abortion was and should be a matter for states to address…And with Dobbs, we see this discursive strategy coming full circle.”

When discussing how these decisions revoke and undermine the privacy of a decision such as abortion, Murray revealed that this will affect similar equality laws. “If the court’s new vision is concerned with an issue’s importance to the American people, then an earlier opinion may be served to power to address a question of profound moral and social importance, than it is highly likely that Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the court held that the Constitution did not permit states to restrict civil marriage to opposite-sex couples, it will be high on the list of possible targets.”

After her lecture, Murray was asked questions by students about the future political and judicial landscape post-Dobbs.

One participant asked, “If the Supreme Court continues down the road of overturning rights in the name of democracy such as gay marriage like you discussed, what can we do to fight back through these democratic processes when gerrymandering and voting rights erosion are taking hold?”

Murray clarified, “The court doesn’t just overrule things. A decision like Dobbs’s is very unusual. More likely, what the court will do is narrow a precedent to a nub of what it once was. Or sometimes they do what you young people might understand as ghosting a precedent. They won’t cite a precedent or use it in cases where it’s very clearly relevant…It’s not always they formally overrule something like they did with Dobbs. It’s narrowing, its misogyny, it’s pivoting, it’s ghosting, there is a lot of ways that they can play with precedent.” She later emphasized the importance of having more numbers in terms of voter turnouts to fight back.