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Page Number: 141.0

6  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment 

entirely  the  right  to  choose  whether  to  terminate  a  preg-
nancy: “To be clear, the questions presented in this petition 
do not require the Court to overturn Roe or Casey.”  Id., at 
5.  Mississippi  tempered  that  statement  with  an  oblique 
one-sentence  footnote  intimating  that,  if  the  Court  could 
not  reconcile  Roe  and  Casey  with  current  facts  or  other 
cases, it “should not retain erroneous precedent.”  Pet. for 
Cert. 5–6, n. 1.  But the State never argued that we should 
grant review for that purpose. 

After  we  granted  certiorari,  however,  Mississippi 
changed course.  In its principal brief, the State bluntly an-
nounced that the Court should overrule Roe and Casey.  The 
Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion, it ar-
gued, and a State should be able to prohibit elective abor-
tions if a rational basis supports doing so.  See Brief for Pe-
titioners 12–13. 

The Court now rewards that gambit, noting three times 
that the parties presented “no half-measures” and argued
that “we must either reaffirm or overrule Roe and Casey.” 
Ante, at 5, 8, 72.  Given those two options, the majority picks 
the latter. 

This framing is not accurate.  In its brief on the merits, 
Mississippi in fact argued at length that a decision simply 
rejecting the viability rule would result in a judgment in its
favor.  See Brief for Petitioners 5, 38–48.  But even if the 
State had not argued as much, it would not matter.  There 
is no rule that parties can confine this Court to disposing of
their  case  on  a  particular  ground—let  alone  when  review 
was sought and granted on a different one.  Our established 
practice is instead not to “formulate a rule of constitutional 
law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it 
is to be applied.”  Washington State Grange v. Washington 
State Republican Party, 552 U. S. 442, 450 (2008) (quoting 
Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U. S. 288, 347 (1936) (Brandeis, J.,
concurring)); see also United States v. Raines, 362 U. S. 17, 
21 (1960).