As your last assignment of the semester, you will write an essay of at least 1500 words. You will have a choice between two different prompts: one concerning abortion and the other concerning guns. If you write in response to the first of these prompts, your essay will be due at 11:55 pm on Wednesday, May 8. (This is the day after our final session and the day before finals begin.)
Unless you are much more interested in the controversy concerning guns than the controversy concerning abortion, I would recommend that you write in response in response to this prompt. If you do so, after all, and if you complete your essay even a day or two early, you will be finished with this course on Tuesday, May 7 and able to focus entirely on your finals in other courses from that point forward.
As noted in the syllabus, this essay will be worth 12 points (between 20 and 25 percent of your overall grade). It should be double-spaced, with one-inch margins and a 12-point font. Please turn it in as a Word attachment. If you work in Google Docs rather than Word, you can convert your finished work to Word by using the “Save as” function and clicking “Download as Word”. You can turn it in either through Sakai (where the prompts will be posted in the Assignments section of the site for this course) or through my email at the following address:
For the sake of common decency and your own self-respect, please do not plagiarize. The penalty for plagiarism on this assignment will be failure of the course and a written report to the Office of Academic Affairs. If you are struggling on the assignment, please contact me and I will do my best to help. If the deadline is looming you and do not believe that you can meet it, please contact me and request an extension. Whatever you do, resist the urge to plagiarize or engage in any other form of academic misconduct. You are all simply better than that.
In general terms, plagiarism consists in presenting work that is not one’s own as one’s own.
Just to be clear, I am not concerned about marginal cases. Nor am I out to trip anyone up. What I am concerned about is a deliberate and systematic attempt to pass off work that is not your own as your own. The chances of plagiarizing to that extent if you do not intend to are basically zero. In case you are still less than clear on what constitutes plagiarism, however, the following guidelines may help:
If you copy more than a few words word for word from another source, then you must place those words in quotation marks and indicate their source. You must do this every time you copy more than a few words word for word from another source.
Even if you merely paraphrase more than a few words from another source, you must acknowledge that fact and indicate the source. This can be done either (a) within the text itself, or (b) in a footnote or endnote.
If, even after reading this, you are still not sure if something constitutes plagiarism, either (a) play it safe and cite your source, or (b) ask me.
On the off chance that this is not obvious, to present work created through and/or by Chat GPT as one’s own is to present work that is not one’s own as one’s own. It meets the definition of plagiarism offered above, therefore.
In case this is not crystal-clear from the foregoing, let me reiterate:
Turning in work created through and/or by Chat GPT on this assignment will result in automatic failure of the course.
For the sake of reference, here is a link to the W&J policy on academic honesty.
https://mywj.washjeff.edu/page/academic-honesty-policy
Prompt
The year is 2062 and your career has been a brilliant success. Perhaps you already knew when you decided to attend Washington and Jefferson College that law school would be your goal, or perhaps this first became clear to you later. In any case, you took to the study of law like a duck to water and were appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States at the relatively young age of 54. Although the Court is still sharply divided on a broad range of issues, you all get along fairly well. Every six months or so, to build collegiality, you and your fellow justices get together for an evening to discuss famous cases from the past. During the next meeting, the cases to be discussed are Roe v. Wade (1973) and Dobbs v. Jackson (2022). To prepare for the discussion, each of you have agreed to compose essays of at least 1500 words (but not more than 2000) in which your will argue either (a) that the Court ultimately came to the right decision when it returned the right to allow or forbid abortion to the individual states, or (b) that it did not. You will then circulate the essays, so that each justice will arrive for the evening having read the other eight. After a nice meal (with plenty of wine) in a private room in an elegant restaurant, the nine of you will go at it hammer and tongs deep into the night.
So, here you are. You well remember the first time you examined the philosophical and legal issues concerning this issue in depth. In the context of your undergraduate course in social and political philosophy, you not only read and discussed the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade and the majority opinion and the dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson; you delved deeply into some of the most important philosophical arguments concerning the issue of abortion. Since the demands on your time and energy are very great, you will not take account of materials produced after 2022. Instead, you carefully review all of the readings you did during the spring semester of 2024 and prepare to write your essay. This essay, you are painfully aware, will be read by all eight of your fellow justices on the Supreme Court of the United States. Since you care deeply what they think, you will do your absolute best and proofread your work with care. Here is your choice of theses:
The majority of justices on the Court that decided Dobbs v. Jackson made the correct decision. There is no implicit right to abortion in the Constitution.
They most certainly did not. There is indeed an implicit right to abortion in the Constitution.
Crucial text
The basic contention of the Court that decided Roe v. Wade, remember, was that section 1 the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right of a woman to abortion prior to the point of fetal viability (the point at which the fetus could survive outside the womb). In case you have misplaced the handout with the all the amendments, here is the relevant part of that section:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In case you wonder why the justices in Roe (by a majority of 7-2) believed that this text implicitly guarantees a right to abortion, you need to review (with great care) section VIII of their decision in that case.
Possible variations
Even if you believe that there is an implicit right to abortion in the Constitution, and thus that the majority in Dobbs got it wrong, you need not rely on the argument used by the majority in Roe. You might well hold, for example, that a stronger argument was possible. If that is your view, you need to start with a review of the argument of the majority in Roe, explain why it is less than convincing even to you, and then explain the argument you take to be stronger.
Even if you believe that the majority in Dobbs got it right, and that there is no implicit right to abortion in the Constitution, you might well believe that the argument of the majority could have been better. If that is your view, you need to explain what the argument of the majority was, in what way or ways it was less than satisfactory even to you, and how you believe that it should have been different.
Even if you believe that the majority in Dobbs got it right, for that matter, you might believe that they did not go far enough in their conclusions. Instead of simply saying that there is no implicit right to abortion in the Constitution and that the issue must be returned to the individual states, you might argue, they should have held that the Constitution of the United States implicitly forbids abortion. (In order to do this, I should mention, the first point you would need to argue is that the fetus has a right to life from the moment of conception. In so doing, moreover, you would need to recall that the Court did not want to rely on the incredibly controversial claim that the fetus is a person. One point on which the majorities in Roe and Dobbs actually agreed is that it is not the role of Court to decide if a fetus is a person.)
Important reminders
In order to convince any of your fellow justices who do not already agree with you, you will most likely need to anticipate and respond effectively to the strongest objection(s) that will most likely occur to them.
The philosophical essays with which we began contain important arguments of which the Supreme Court could have made use in Roe and/or Dobbs. No matter which of the two theses you adopt, therefore, it will be important to ask yourself if the argument of Warren, the argument of Marquis, or the argument of Thomson may be of use to you.
