I probably shouldn't write this, but I'm furious at some people.
I keep seeing PEOPLE WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER passing around the absolutely idiotic claim that Amy Coney Barrett called Roe v. Wade an "erroneous decision".
This is as bloody damned stupid as the claim about the New York Times not paying taxes. You people graduated from high school, and I'm almost certain that you graduated from college. Somewhere along the way had to have learned what a citation is.
It's the 21st century, and fact checking a claim like "Barret called Roe v. Wade an erroneous decision" is trivial now. You didn't check it because it felt better to spread the lie than to spread the truth. It didn't take me more than 30 seconds to find the paper that is purported to contain the offending claim.
The source of the claim is a paper that Professor Barret wrote in 2003 called "Stare Decisis and Due Process". Nowhere in the paper (outside of one unimportant footnote) does she mention Roe v Wade. The only usage of the words "erroneous decision" occurs in the paragraph reproduced here, below. (And please read the damned paragraph, read it in the context of a paper titled "Stare Decisis and Due Process", and understand the point she is making about reliance interests)
"The questions that traditionally have occupied courts and scholars with respect to stare decisis are systemic. Courts and commentators have considered the kinds of errors that justify or even require the overruling of precedent. They have thought about the kinds of reliance interests that justify keeping an erroneous decision on the books. (See footnote 70) They have debated whether the force of a precedent should vary with its subject matter - whether it should be particularly weak in constitutional cases and cases dealing with procedure and evidence, and particularly strong in statutory cases and cases dealing with property and contract. They have worried about whether a weak form of stare decisis would harm the public's perception of the judiciary. They have analyzed whether stare decisis is efficient."
Footnote 70 cites the following 4 sources (which are a court opinion, a dissent, and two books) that contain discussion of when reliance interests do or do not justify keeping an erroneous decision on the books:
(1) Planned Parenthood v. Casey, pages 855-57 (holding that reliance on availability of abortion counts in stare decisis calculus)
(2) Planned Parenthood v. Casey, pages 956-57 (Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting, insisting that such abstract interests do not count)
(3) Michael J. Gerhardt, "The Pressure of Precedent: A Critique of the Conservative Approaches to Stare Decisis in Abortion Cases", (claiming that reliance interests at stake in Casey were even greater than plurality imagined)
(4) "Equal Justice: The Warren Era of the Supreme Court" (arguing that stare decisis should be strongest when overruling precedent would contract individual freedom and weakest when overruling would expand individual freedom.)
Absolutely NOWHERE in that paper does the author refer to Roe v. Wade (or Casey v. Planned Parenthood) as "an erroneous decision".
And the icing on the cake? The section of Casey that she cited contains this:
"Although Roe has engendered opposition, it has in no sense proven "unworkable", representing as it does a simple limitation beyond which a state law is unenforceable."
You should be ashamed of yourselves. You are in no fashion better than the Trump cultists.
