No. of Recommendations: 5
Which makes it all the more wonderous that the stacked-and-loaded Arizona Supreme Court thought reinstituting a law from that era, passed by a legislature led by this man, was a good idea.
To clarify, the AZ Court did not reinstitute the old law - much less because they thought it was a good idea.
The only action they took was to: i) invalidate the 1973 injunction holding that Roe prohibited the enforcement of the law; and ii) hold that the later-adopted 15-week abortion ban did not modify the prior law. The first action was unequivocally correct, after Dobbs. The second action was very likely correct, given the precedent on statutory construction in Arizona outlined in the opinion.
Lots of laws are very, very old - each state's murder statute, for example, was probably first enacted a century or more ago. It will have been tweaked and recodified over the decades, like the AZ statute, but it will have first been put in place way back in the day. The fact that it is very old, or might have been first enacted by people who are horrible by modern lights, doesn't make it legally deficient.
So it's really not all that surprising that where there's a law (even an older law) that was enjoined (but never repealed) based on Roe, that once Roe was overruled that the law would now be enforceable. While we can (correctly) be appalled at the situation created by Dobbs in Arizona, that doesn't mean that the AZ Court make any error in holding that this is the legal outcome once Roe was struck down.
