Midnight in the Courtroom of Good and Evil

Abstract:     
Degeneracy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Much of the religiously motivated political activism in the contemporary United States arises from the belief that landmark Supreme Court cases such as Roe v. Wade and Eisenstadt v. Baird not only were wrongly decided, but also underlie many of the social pathologies that afflict the country. In the spirit of The Sount of Legal Thunder: The Chaotic Consequences of Crushing Constitutional Butterflies, http://ssrn.com/abstract=939969, this essay ponders what might have been if the Supreme Court had never decided either Roe or Eisenstadt. One surprising possibility might be judicial recognition of a right to same-sex marriage.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 6

Keywords: constitutional law, chaos theory, Roe v. Wade, Eisenstadt v. Baird, abortion, contraception, marriage, homosexuality, substantive due process, equal protection, same-sex marriage

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