Jul 5, 2022
In 1987 the Senate rejected President Reagan's nominee for the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, because his views were considered dangerously outside the mainstream. Among other things, Bork believed the Constitution did not contain a right to privacy. Today, some of Bork's ideas have been validated by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. By striking down Roe v Wade, the court killed the notion that any implied right to privacy in the Fourteenth Amendment or elsewhere in the Constitution protects access to abortion. In this episode, esteemed Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Amar traces the history of the right to privacy in the law from colonial times to the 1973 landmark ruling that the Roberts court has relegated to history.