Actually, Blackmun--the person who wrote the opinion--did pay attention to the polls concerning abortion, given that he had a copy of a poll in his files. It is not clear to what extent the other justices paid attention to such polls, but we know at least one--and the one who wrote the opinion, at that--was indeed taking it into account.
Roe v. Wade actually got a lot of heat from legal scholars at the time, John Hart Ely's "The Wages of Crying Wolf" probably being the most notable.
I still hold that Plessy v. Ferguson relied better on precedent and was better reasoned than Roe v. Wade. While disagreeing with Plessy, Jamal Greene noted in his article "The Anticanon" that "Plessy was consistent with Court precedent, with the most defensible original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, and with the text of the Equal Protection Clause." None of this can be stated in favor of Roe v. Wade.
(by the way, "The Anticanon", available here, is a spectacular article that goes into detail concerning the background and reasoning of the most notorious Supreme Court decisions--specifically Scott, Plessy, Lochner, and Korematsu--along with thoughts as to why those decisions were the ones that got singled out as "the anticanon" rather than others. It's highly readable and is fascinating, and despite not agreeing with everything it has to say, I heartily recommend it to everyone)
Roe v. Wade actually got a lot of heat from legal scholars at the time, John Hart Ely's "The Wages of Crying Wolf" probably being the most notable.
Originally posted by lilpixieofterror
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(by the way, "The Anticanon", available here, is a spectacular article that goes into detail concerning the background and reasoning of the most notorious Supreme Court decisions--specifically Scott, Plessy, Lochner, and Korematsu--along with thoughts as to why those decisions were the ones that got singled out as "the anticanon" rather than others. It's highly readable and is fascinating, and despite not agreeing with everything it has to say, I heartily recommend it to everyone)
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