Eminent Domain

My chambers, as a federal court of appeals judge on the District of Columbia Circuit, were on the third floor of the United States Courthouse and overlooked Constitution Avenue. Twice a year, along with my clerks and secretaries, I watched massive marches come down that wide street, one by anti-abortionists and one by pro-abortionists. The reason for those parades was, of course, Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision making abortion a matter of constitutional right, thus largely removing the issue from state legislatures, where it had rested for all of our history. Each group first gathers to demonstrate outside the White House, then forms, carry placards and sometimes chanting, to begin the lengthy walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to Constitution Avenue and on to Capitol Hill. There there demonstrators march past the House of Congress with hardly a glance and go straight to the Supreme Court building to make their moral sentiments known where they perceive those sentiments to be relevant. The demonstrators on both sides believe the issue to be moral, not legal. So far as they are concerned, however, the primary political branch of government, to which they must address their petitions, is the Supreme Court. There is something very disturbing about those marches, for, if the marchers correctly perceive the reality, and I think it undeniable that they do, a major heresy has entered the American constitutional system.