In "Hunt down the Supreme Court leaker," 2021 James Wilson Fellow Josh Hammer discusses the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. He explains that, while the decision will likely help end abortion in America, no one knows who leaked Roberts' opinion. If no one identifies the leaker, Hammer predicts, then the leak would establish a precedent for damaging the ethical standards of the Supreme Court. Hammer then urges the Court, specifically Gail Curley and Roberts, to solve the issue immediately, for the judiciary's own good. We have included some excerpts below for your perusal.

"While Democrats and the corporate press immediately focused on the likely impending de-constitutionalization of the Left’s favorite concocted constitutional “right,” abortion, perhaps just as important was — and still is — the fact that this debilitating leak happened in the first place. If the once-sacrosanct idea of the Supreme Court as a legal, and not a political, institution is to mean anything at all, then the Court cannot be subjected to the Bismarckian“sausage-making” process that afflicts the political branches, including leaks and external lobbying campaigns."

"It is simply stunning that we do not yet know the identity of the leaker. Given the small sample size of possible leakers — there are 37 current Court clerks and nine current justices, and the denominator of realistic possible leakers is even much smaller than that sum of 46 — and the urgency with which we might have expected Chief Justice John Roberts to handle this extraordinary assault upon the Court’s independence and legitimacy, I predicted that we would know the leaker’s identity within days."

"Roberts’ wariness about widening the probe to include not merely Curley and her direct underlings, but other federal governmental actors such as the FBI, is understandable but misplaced. Again, it is impossible to overstate the debilitating nature of this leak. If the leaker is not identified and punished — ideally disbarred and publicly shamed to no end — then future prospective leakers will only be incentivized and emboldened. And the metastasis of a leak culture within the Court’s halls would represent nothing less than the death of the Court as an institution."

"The justices’ job from here on out is clear. They must plow ahead, resist this vile public intimidation campaign, and send Roe to the ash heap of history. And sooner rather than later, God-willing and assuming even a modicum of competence from John Roberts and Gail Curley, the Dobbs leaker will be exposed and forever tarnished in the eyes of civic-minded patriots as someone who attempted — and failed — to take down the United States Supreme Court."

The article was first published in the Spectator World. To read "Hunt down the Supreme Court leaker" in its entirety, please click here.