Roe v. Wade Leak – Who Did it? On Monday, a draft opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was leaked. In the opinion, Justice Alito said that the Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights in the United States was “egregiously wrong from the start” and that it “must be overruled.”
The leak has since been authenticated, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing on Tuesday that an investigation into the lead will take place.
Investigation Will Be Launched
In announcing the upcoming investigation, Justice Roberts said that the leak was a “singular and egregious breach” of trust within the court and that he has directed the Marshal of the Court to initiate an investigation into who was responsible for the document being leaked to the press.
“Court employees have an exemplary and important tradition of respecting the confidentiality of the judicial process and upholding the trust of the Court,” Roberts said.
The marshal of the Supreme Court, Col. Gail A. Curley, oversees hundreds of employees within the court, including the court’s police department. Little is known about how Curley will conduct such an investigation and how possible it will be to determine who is responsible for the leak, although some reporters have already made suggestions about who they believe it may be.
Lawyer Will Chamberlain, who serves as senior counsel for the Internet Accountability Project, published a Twitter thread on May 3 suggesting that Supreme Court law clerk Elizabeth Deutsch may have been responsible for the leak.
Chamberlain, who claims to have no inside information and admitted himself that the thread was “speculation” that is “based almost entirely on publicly available information, cited Deutsch’s Master’s degree in “Gender,” her Yale Law research paper about reproductive rights, and the fact that the Politico reporter who first published the leak attended her wedding.
Chamberlain also clarified that he “could easily be wrong.”
What Consequences Will the Leaker Face?
Orin Kerr, a criminal law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that a leaker with the authority to handle a draft opinion may be charged with stealing or converting federal government property for their own use.
Anybody who lies to investigators may also face federal false statement charges.
Under Washington bar rules, lawyers are also prohibited from conducting themselves in a dishonest way, committing fraud, or engaging in deceit or misrepresentation. Leaking a draft opinion, therefore, would be a violation of these rules and could result in disbarment.
What will happen, however, is anybody’s guess. A leak of this kind has never occurred. However, a series of leaks in the 1970s did result in a law clerk code of conduct being adopted that blocked clerks from closing confidential information that is obtained during the course of official duties within the court.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
