(PartiallyPolitics.com) – On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down a federal court ruling that allowed minors to go to court to get permission to get an abortion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will be writing the solo dissent in the case.
The ruling from the court vacated a lower court ruling that allowed state court clerk’s to be sued for informing the parents of a pregnant teenager about their child’s attempts to get the court to allow her to get an abortion without her parent’s consent.
Jackson’s dissent was specifically focused on Munsingwear vacatur, which speculated that a case is vacated been disputed because of a pending review by a higher court unless the party impacted is not responsible for the case’s “mootness.” In her descent, Jackson expresses concerns that the use of “‘Munsingwear vacaturs’ has drifted away from the doctrine’s foundational moorings.”
The specific case comes from a lawsuit filed in Missouri that speculated that a court clerk violated the rights of a 17-year-old pregnant teenager. According to state law, any minor looking to receive an abortion requires their parent’s permission, however, a minor is allowed to go to court in order to bypass that requirement. The teenager in the case went to court in 2018 to get the required bypass, but Chapman stated that she would need to inform the teenager’s parents about the hearing.
The teenager then had to get a judicial bypass from Illinois in order to receive the abortion. Two federal courts had previously rejected Chapman’s claim that she had been immune from the lawsuit. On Monday, the Supreme Court stated that the lower court ruling that Chapman was not immune had been rejected and sent the case to the appeal court so that the lawsuit could be closed as moot.
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