Pushing Boundaries

Abstract

This essay was originally published in Balkinization as part of an online symposium and it is reprinted with permission. The essay engages with Julie Suk\u27s book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It. It suggests that feminist legal scholars have been considering their intellectual options in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In After Misogyny, Professor Suk offers a conceptual path forward in a post-Dobbs world. Suk’s trenchant analysis of the failure of law to render substantive gender equality and her proposals to remedy that failure are sound. Yet, the essay asks whether the United States has the constitutional conditions under which those proposals could actually come to fruition