In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court repudiated the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Justice Alito’s majority opinion denied that it “cast doubt” on any other precedents. But Justice Thomas’s concurrence declared that all of the substantive due process decisions protecting personal autonomy and bodily integrity — the right to use contraceptives, and the rights to “same-sex” intimacy and marriage — were “demonstrably erroneous” and should also be overruled.

Is the Supreme Court just getting started? Many liberals and progressives have feared so. Many conservatives have hoped so. Others have tried to draw lines.

In this talk, James Fleming will address these issues in the light of his recent book, Constructing Basic Liberties: A Defense of Substantive Due Process (U. of Chicago Press, 2022), which argues that the substantive due process rights to personal autonomy and bodily integrity are necessary to extend ordered liberty and the status of equal membership in our political community to all.

James E. Fleming is the Honorable Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. His many books include Fidelity to Our Imperfect Constitution, Ordered Liberty, Constitutional Interpretation, Securing Constitutional Democracy and American Constitutional Interpretation. He has held faculty research fellowships at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs and Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics. He is the former editor of Nomos, the annual book of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, where he is also a past president.