No. of Recommendations: 4
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the AZSC's ruling is that they put their own ruling on hold and sent the case that drove it back to the appellate court to review the 1864 law's constitutionality. That seems to make ZERO sense.
From what I can glean from the opinion, this is an artifact of the unusual procedural circumstances of Arizona's law and Roe/Dobbs.
TL;DR - the only issue that was in front of the AZ Supreme Court was a limited, statutory interpretation question of whether AZ's later adopted 15-week ban modified or restricted or otherwise invalidated the old 1864 law. No other constitutional issues were yet before the Court, so no other constitutional issues were decided.
Longer answer: so back in the 1970's, there was a bunch of litigation over whether Arizona's laws prohibiting abortion were constitutional. Those lawsuits alleged a number of different constitutional defects in the laws, and they were all pending resolution when Roe was established. Roe put an end to all that litigation, obviously. The Arizona Court of Appeals (their intermediate court, which is where the case was at the time) issued a permanent injunction against enforcing the law. Their holding was, in a nutshell, "because Roe no state official can enforce this law."
Flash forward to Dobbs, and Arizona moved to have the permanent injunction released. Planned Parenthood (the original plaintiff) opposed the motion to release the permanent injunction. They conceded that the original basis for the injunction (Roe) was gone, but argued that because AZ had subsequently adopted the 15-week ban, that law was a modification of the 1864 law and therefore should be what governs. The AZ Supreme Court rejected that argument.
Because of the weird procedural posture - arguing over the 1973 injunction - the constitutionality of the underlying law was not actually before the AZ Court. So now, everybody kind of "zaps back" to their 1973 pre-Roe positions - the law exists, but all of the constitutional (and other?) arguments against it that were mooted by Roe are now available for the parties to litigate. Essentially, the 50-year "time out" on this issue that was imposed by the SCOTUS is now over, and the parties are back where they were.
Which is why the Court's ruling didn't foreclose someone raising a constitutional objection to the law, and why the Court granted a stay so that the parties would have time to submit those arguments (and requests for temporary injunctions) to the lower courts.
