The ruling handed down this week by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, already being described as “the most significant victory in a generation” for abortion rights, raises some interesting parallels with halakhah. One of these, of course, is the substantive issue: does halakhah permit abortion and, if so, under what circumstances? We’ll address that important and complex question in a forthcoming post. But right now we’re focused on the matter of process. It turns out that, for all the differences between American law and Jewish law, the two systems display some interesting similarities in the way decisions are made. No big surprise there. Both legal traditions express themselves in the form of written texts, and those texts must be interpreted so that they can yield new meanings and speak to the cases and questions that arise every day. Lawyers and rabbis, in other words, share much the same interpretive task. And two comments by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her concurring opinion in Whole Woman’s Health offer insight into the way in which judges and poskim alike should think about doing their jobs. Continue reading A Supreme Court Justice and a Rosh Yeshiva on the Art of Halakhic Decision →