Roe nullified abortion statutes in forty-six states nationwide

Evidence

Roe and Doe had national implications. Thirty-one states had abortion laws like Texas’s, 13 had reformed laws like Georgia’s, and two banned all abortions. Presumably, the Court’s rulings required those states to abandon their abortion laws. Only the four states that had repealed their abortion laws were unaffected. The opinion of the Court also enunciated unusually detailed guidelines governing how states could regulate abortion in the future. The clarity of the Court’s guidelines stood in sharp contrast to the vague “all deliberate speed” formula in Brown v. Board of Education. After Roe, states for the most part knew what sorts of regulations of abortion would survive judicial scrutiny. The very detail of the guidelines, however, particularly in the absence of clear support in the text of the Constitution, opened the Court to criticism that it was legislating rather than judging. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3113

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts Roe’s detailed guidelines with Brown’s vague ‘all deliberate speed’ formula, linking to earlier chapters on Brown and desegregation implementation (ch141-143). — connects to: Restrictive abortion laws did not reduce the number of actual abortions, only legal ones; Roe v. Wade resulted from organized litigation campaigns, not happenstance; After Roe the Supreme Court closely policed abortion laws for two decades unlike post-Brown — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3142 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: The claim that Roe’s detail opened it to ‘legislating’ criticism connects to the recurring question of how guideline specificity affects judicial legitimacy.