During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Brett Kavanaugh has called Roe v. Wade an “important precedent” that has been “reaffirmed many times.” However, in newly released emails from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh once questioned whether the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the U.S. should be considered “settled law.”
“I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so,” Kavanaugh said in a 2003 email.
When asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif., the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to clarify his thoughts on Roe, Kavanaugh said he was referring in the email to “what legal scholars” might say.
“I think my comment in the email was that might be overstating the position of legal scholars and so it wasn’t a technically accurate description in the letter of what legal scholars thought,” Kavanaugh said, adding, “The broader point was simply that I think it was overstating something about legal scholars, and I’m always concerned with accuracy, and I thought that was not quite [an] accurate description of all legal scholars because it referred to all.”
Kavanaugh then reiterated that he believes Roe v. Wade to “be an important precedent of the Supreme Court” that has “been reaffirmed many times.”
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