The Roe Court’s suppression of a foundational question—who is the law for—means that the decision could be overturned by any of several feticide cases that could reach the current Court.

The Paradox of Persons Forty Years After Roe

by Gerard V. Bradley

Abortion is the great civil rights issue of our time because it raises—uniquely and compellingly—every society’s foundational question about law and justice:

• Who is the law for? 
• For whose benefit do we plan, build, and apply this vast apparatus we call the “rule of law”?

The question is foundational because it is prior, in status and importance, to the question: What shall the law be? It is foundational because answering it correctly is essential to justice. Anyone can see that even the most refined arrangement of legal rights and duties counts for naught if the strong can manipulate the foundational question, and deny the benefits of law to those they wish to exploit.

Jurists as far back as Justinian in the sixth century correctly saw that law is forpersons, not the other way around. Persons are the point of law; law is their servant.

Persons are not entities identified through policy analysis. They are not the sums of interests balanced, the deliverables of a vast progressive agenda. The older jurists saw, too, that the question of “personhood” could not be an intra-systemic riddle, solved by a feat of technical legal reasoning, and answered with a legal fiction.

Being prior to law and indispensable to justice, the foundational question must be answered according to the truth: Everyone who really is a person counts in law as one.

..........

Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com