Book Talk: Constructing Basic Liberties with Professor Jim Fleming

James E. Fleming will speak at Rutgers Law’s “Book Talk: Constructing Basic Liberties with Prof. Jim Fleming” on March 22, 2023 from 4:00 to 5:15pm.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which had protected the constitutional right of pregnant persons to decide whether to terminate their pregnancies. James E. Fleming will discuss his timely and important new book, Constructing Basic Liberties: A Defense of Substantive Due Process (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Professor Fleming will argue—in terms of Bob Dylan’s prophetic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—that in Dobbs we can hear “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” of personal autonomy and bodily integrity that should be protected through the doctrine of substantive due process. These basic liberties, he argues in his book, are necessary to extend ordered liberty and the status of equal membership in our political community to all.