Dutch colonial promissory note to a former slaveholder, Suriname, 1863. Rijksmuseum.

Freedom

Volume XV, Number 1 | spring 2023

Miscellany

“The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a 2018 interview with legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.

—Louis Brandeis, 1928