[ronald_reagan]

Liberal legal scholars have criticized Roe, despite their opposition to pro-life laws, arguing that the ends achieved by Roe do not justify the means.[21]

William Saletan, for example, has written that "Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference."[22] In a 1973 article in the Yale Law Journal, Professor John Hart Ely criticized Roe as a decision which "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."[23] Ely added: "What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure."

Similarly, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has noted that, "One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found."[24] Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox wrote: "[Roe’s] failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations.... Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution."[25]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has criticized the court's ruling in Roe v. Wade for terminating a nascent democratic movement to liberalize abortion law.[26] Likewise, legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen[27] and Michael Kinsley[28] say that a democratic movement would have been the correct way to build a more durable consensus in support of abortion rights.

Legal analyst Benjamin Wittes has written that Roe "disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply".[29] Edward Lazarus, a former Blackmun clerk who "loved Roe’s author like a grandfather" wrote: "As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible....Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the almost 30 years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms."[30] Liberal law professors Alan Dershowitz,[31] Cass Sunstein,[32] and Kermit Roosevelt[33] have also expressed disappointment with Roe.

from wikipedia