Neoliberal legal scholars opposed constitutional sexual rights, not supported them

Evidence

It is almost universally assumed that neoliberal legal scholars were sympathetic to—perhaps even ultimately responsible for—the jurisprudence of privacy that transformed sexual freedom into a (limited) constitutional right in the late 1960s and 1970s. Thus, a certain kind of left-wing critique of neoliberalism sees it as having inspired the individualist ethics of sexual choice informing such landmark cases as the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 and by extension all other cases involving the recognition of a constitutional right to sexual liberty. In fact, the opposite is true: a scholar such as Richard Posner who otherwise supported the extension of the private commercial contract (in such areas as the trade in drugs, sex and babies) was unequivocally hostile to the idea of a constitutional right to sexual freedom, for the simple reason that it might impose an obligation on the state to actively enable and subsidize the freedoms in question. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 240

Categorization

• XREF: Directly fractures the caricature that pro-market thinkers championed privacy-based sexual liberation; echoes the book’s larger argument about internal legal-vs-market varieties.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the left misread Roe as a triumph of individualist market ethics, when the real split was between contractual freedom and state-subsidized constitutional rights.