for 135 million americans. right now the average american has to travel about 25 miles to reach the nearest abortion provider. without roe that distance increases to 125 miles. now, we won t know the court s decision until june, but it only takes just five votes to strip millions of their access to safe abortions. this week the message from the high court to women across the country rang loud and clear. it may be your body, but it s their choice. joining me now to break down some of the arguments from wednesday is an assistant professor of law at the university michigan law school and co-host of the strict scrutiny podcast which covers the supreme court. leah, it s great to have you with us and thanks for joining us this evening. first, i want to talk about what we heard from justice kavanaugh there on precedent. he invoked cases such as brown vs. board of education, blessy
for 135 million americans. right now the average american has to travel about 25 miles to reach the nearest abortion provider. without roe that distance increases to 125 miles. now, we won t know the court s decision until june, but it only takes just five votes to strip millions of their access to safe abortions. this week the message from the high court to women across the country rang loud and clear. it may be your body, but it s their choice. joining me now to break down some of the arguments from wednesday is an assistant professor of law at the university michigan law school and co-host of the strict scrutiny podcast which covers the supreme court. leah, it s great to have you with us and thanks for joining us this evening. first, i want to talk about what we heard from justice kavanaugh there on precedent. because it boils down to a legal argument. he invoked cases such as brown vs. board of education, plessy vs. ferguson. obviously those are monumental
supreme court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other. as a judge, it is an important precedent of the supreme court. by it, i mean roe v. wade and planned parenthood vs. casey. it s been reaffirmed many times. casey is precedent on precedent. roe is not a super precedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased but that doesn t mean that roe should be overruled. it just means that it doesn t fall on the small handful of cases like marbry vs. madison and brown vs. the board that no one questions anymore. okay, so we hear them speak there, justices gorsuch, kavanaugh and barrett. if they rule to uphold the mississippi law, does it contradict, particularly gorsuch and kavanaugh, does it contradict what they told congress during their confirmation hearings to get them on the bench? i mean, it was clear that they were obfuscating. they said that roe was
the attorney general continued to make the case saying this is like the brown vs. board of education. and he concluded by saying this. this is not brown versus board of education. this is the opposite of brown. it over ruled one of the maybe worse supreme court cases that was so fundamentally intentioned with our nation s ideals. it said we don t leave that up to a majority vote. we get into the thicket and say this is off of the table. justice cavanagh was saying let s leave this up to the people. let s not dirty our hands on
testing measures. many elite colleges take in more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. it cannot be those millions of students have no talent. it s just that we don t have a good enough mechanism to find them. elite chejs should be taken it many more students anyway. endowments have grown, they the class sizes from expanded very slowly. this emphasis on access should animate politicians. the biggest problem with the american education is that is does very badly for poor kids. as dan points out. comprehensive separates the rich from the rest in an unequal america. the educational gap between the rich and poor today is greater than between blacks and whites in 1954. when brown vs. board of education out lawed school s