After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in May of 2022, Justice Samuel Alito warned his colleagues that delaying its official release “was a security threat,” The Federalist’s Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway reports in her new book, Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. Despite the danger, Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor included a footnote in their joint dissent tying Dobbs to an unreleased opinion — ensuring Dobbs could not be released until the other case was decided, Hemingway reveals.
Notably, the majority opinion was ready in February, and only the dissent needed to be finalized. But the liberal justices’ dissent lagged, holding up the decision’s release. When the justices convened on May 12 to assess the progress of the pending opinions, Dobbs was graded a “C,” meaning it was “not near completion” despite the majority opinion having been completed for months.
“Gorsuch spoke up, asking for a date by which they might be done,” Hemingway writes. “[The dissenters] would not give a date.”
“The dissenting justices eventually agreed to complete their Dobbs dissent by June 1 in return for an extension to June 15 of the deadline for their majority opinions in other cases,” Hemingway adds.
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