One way to look at the situation of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee awaiting a Senate vote, is as only the latest episode in the long story of Griswold v. Connecticut.
Griswold is the 1965 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law that had outlawed the use of contraception. The court’s opinion, by William Douglas, found a “right of privacy,” reasoning in part that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”
Griswold was the basis for Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights case decided by the Supreme Court in 1973. It was the basis for Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law. It was the basis for Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case in which the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In all three cases—Roe, Lawrence, Obergefell—the court’s opinions cited Griswold extensively and relied on it.
One reason that many Democratic senators and advocacy groups opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation even before a sexual assault allegation surfaced was their fear that a Justice Kavanaugh and his colleagues might overturn or limit the privacy right discovered in Griswold and extended in its successor cases, writes Ira Stoll.
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