Alito’s Opinion Is Brilliant and Shrewd

What he has penned is the crowning achievement of the conservative legal movement.

We should hesitate to treat the leaked Supreme Court opinion, authored by Justice Thomas Alito, as likely to resemble the final opinion of the Court. It is over three months old. The opinion’s length, an exhaustive 98 pages, its direct language: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” and its long recounting of the historic opinions of previous courts on the matter of abortion — which amount to a kind of shadow opinion on abortion’s essential barbarity — suggest to me that...