Constitutional Law Isn’t a Science, It’s Just Politics

You can justify just about anything with a 200-year-old piece of paper.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
4 min readJul 29, 2022
Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

The overturning of Roe v. Wade — and the plans of the right-wing majority of the SCOTUS to come for other rights, too — has had me thinking lately. (Thanks to my long European vacation I haven’t written anything new so far, but you can find my opinion on abortion on the pinned stories on my profile.)

Apart from my opinions on women’s reproductive freedom, what I think is worth thinking about is the Constitution itself, and the role of the SCOTUS in interpreting it. I may have worked with lawyers for a long time. :)

When something like this happens, you’re always going to see a lot of opinions supporting both opinions. Jurists and scholars will pretend they have an absolute truth on the matter. A fool-proof justification for their opinion.

How is it that so many important SCOTUS decisions now rely on a constitutional amendment from 1868 that speaks about citizenship, liberty and equal protection under the law, in an incredibly vague way?

Isn’t this SCOTUS decision unconstitutional? Or was it that abortion, marriage equality, interracial marriage and contraception are against the spirit of the Constitution?

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Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.