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Thursday, May 12th, 2022

That 13th-century law treatise Alito uses? Here’s what else it says.

Author:     Dana Milbank
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     May 9, 2022 | 6:38 p.m. EDT
 Link: That 13th-century law treatise Alito uses? Here’s what else it says.
Stephan:   The full Alito opinion and its references is too long for SR, so I went looking for something that would present what I saw as the bizarre medieval thinking upon which Alito grounds the opinion he wrote and found Dana Milbank's essay which did exactly that. This is how weird Alito's thinking is. Where one would expect from a Supreme Court Associate Justice wise nonpolitical thinking grounded in law we are given sophistry, personal bias and... well, crap.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Credit: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Many have speculated that Samuel Alito, in his draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, is trying to take us back to the 1950s, when White Christian men still ruled.

The Supreme Court justice is actually revisiting the 1250s, when the judge Henry de Bracton completed his summation of English law and custom “De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae.” Alito’s opinion, after mocking the Roe decision for its “discussion of abortion in antiquity,” then provides a discussion of abortion in medieval times: “Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has ‘struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused an abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated … he commits homicide.”

Case closed?

Over the weekend, “Saturday Night Live’s” cold open featured a 13th-century Benedict Cumberbatch proposing such a law against abortion (like the “law we have against pointy shoes”) and then threatening to burn […]

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