After Roe v. Wade: An Evening With Dahlia Lithwick

The U.S. Supreme Court opened a new era of activism following its landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. This decision has since sparked a far-reaching debate on women’s rights, health care, economic inequality and racism.

At this lecture, renowned journalist Dahlia Lithwick, senior legal correspondent at Slate Magazine and host of “Amicus,” Slate’s biweekly podcast about the law, explored the major consequences of the Dobbs decision, including a rise in women’s rights activism.

Dr. Rola El-Serag, director of the Center for Health and Biosciences and the institute’s L.E. and Virginia Simmons Senior Fellow in Health Policy, and Helena Michie, director of Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (CSWGS), delivered welcome remarks. Sherry Merfish, co-chair of the CSWGS Advisory Board, moderated a Q&A session following Lithwick's lecture.

A signing of Lithwick’s new book “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America” (Penguin Press, 2022) took place during the reception before the lecture. Copies of the book were available for purchase before and after the lecture courtesy of the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC Ann and Stephen Kaufman Jewish Book & Arts Festival.

This free, public event was co-sponsored by the Baker Institute Center for Health and Biosciences and Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

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Agenda

6:00 pm CST — Reception
6:30 pm CST — Lecture and Q&A

Registration

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Participants

Featured Speaker

Dahlia Lithwick is a senior legal correspondent at Slate Magazine, as well as the host of “Amicus,” Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic and Commentary, among other places.

Lithwick is the author of “Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America” (Penguin Press, 2022), which tells the stories of women lawyers across the U.S. who, independently of each other, took action at crucial moments, including Sally Yates, then-acting attorney general of the United States, who refused to sign off on the Muslim travel ban; Becca Heller, the founder of a refugee assistance program who brought the fight over the travel ban to the airports; Roberta Kaplan, the famed commercial litigator who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; and Stacey Abrams, whose efforts to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians may well have been what won the Senate for the Democrats in 2020.