Setting boundaries between crime and rights

Abstract

Abstract In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson overturned two precedents, thus ending American women’s 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework and Labov’s model of narrative structure, this study focuses on how justices (de)legitimate abortion rights in contrasting narratives in Dobbs through authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis. Specifically, we propose a theoretical model of judicial narrative strata to deconstruct the language of justices and explain how judicial narratives set boundaries between two different moral economies around abortion and realize the transformation of a conceived right into a punishable crime. Furthermore, this study suggests that in the post-Dobbs era, the justices’ narrative reconfiguration of moral boundaries may turn into social boundaries and trigger more gender segregation, which might also have theoretical and practical implications for legislation and judicial practices in other jurisdictions.