Siegel and Ziegler on Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and May Again Threaten It @YaleLawSch @maryrziegler

Reva Siegel, Yale University Law School, and Mary Ziegler, University of California, Davis, School of Law, are publishing Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and May Again Threaten It in the Yale Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

In the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the antiabortion movement has focused on a new strategy: transforming the Comstock Act, a postal obscenity statute enacted in 1873, into a de facto national ban on abortion. Claims on the Comstock Act have been asserted in the medication abortion case now before the Supreme Court and in the campaign for the Presidency. This Article offers one of the first legal histories of the Comstock Act that reaches from its enactment to its post-Dobbs reinvention, offering critical resources for evaluating claims for revived enforcement of Comstock that are now being asserted in courts and in politics. The history this Article uncovers undermines revivalists’ claims about the Comstock statute’s meaning and the democratic legitimacy of reviving its enforcement. Yet the Article’s significance ranges well beyond the revival debate, as it uncovers in conflicts over Comstock’s enforcement popular claims on democracy, liberty, and equality in which we can recognize roots of modern free speech law and the law of sexual and reproductive liberty lost to constitutional memory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.