16. When the Court Says Your Life Planning Doesn't Matter
Understanding reliance in Dobbs
You make major life decisions—career choices, when to have children, where to live, how to plan your finances—based on a constitutional right that has existed for nearly half a century. Then one day, the Supreme Court says your reliance on that right was too “generalized” to matter.
That’s exactly what happened in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court’s treatment of “reliance interests” reveals something crucial about how constitutional law really works—and who gets to count as worthy of legal protection.
What Are Reliance Interests?
In constitutional law, courts are reluctant to overturn precedents partly because people structure their lives around existing legal rules. This principle—called stare decisis—recognizes that sudden legal changes can devastate settled expectations.
When the Court considers overturning precedent, it asks: Have people relied on this decision in ways that make overturning it particularly harmful?
The classic example: If the Court recognized a right to same-sex marriage, and thousands of couples married and built families based on that right, overturning the precedent would destroy concrete, legally-recognized relationships.
But how do you measure reliance? And what kinds of life planning count as constitutionally significant?
Casey’s Revolutionary Understanding of Women’s Reliance
Back in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey faced the question of whether to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Court chose to uphold Roe, and reliance interests played a crucial role.
Casey didn’t just acknowledge that women relied on abortion access—it understood that this reliance was foundational to women’s equality:
“The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”
This was groundbreaking. Casey recognized that reproductive autonomy wasn’t just about individual choice—it was about women’s capacity to participate as equal citizens. The Court understood that decades of women had made “countless life decisions” based on their ability to “control and time pregnancies”:
Where to live
Whether and how to invest in education or careers
How to allocate financial resources
How to approach intimate and family relationships
For 30 years, this understanding seemed settled. Then came Dobbs.
Dobbs: Why Women’s Life Planning Suddenly Didn’t Count
The Dobbs majority took a radically different approach to reliance. Justice Alito’s opinion essentially argued that women's dependence on abortion access was too “intangible” and “generalized” to constitute real reliance interests.
The Court’s New Test: To count constitutionally, reliance must be:
Concrete and specific (not generalized)
Forward-looking and contractual (like marriage)
Individually measurable (not societal)
Why Abortion Failed This Test: According to the majority, “women do not structure their entire lives around the assumption that they will need an abortion.” Unlike same-sex couples who “build lives and families based on marriage rights,” abortion represents episodic healthcare, not ongoing life planning.
This reasoning is remarkable. The Court essentially said: Yes, women have relied on abortion access for decades to make major life decisions, but that reliance is too diffuse and societal to matter constitutionally.
The Conservative Response: Applauding Constitutional Restraint
Conservative legal scholars largely praised the Dobbs approach to reliance, seeing it as constitutional course correction.
The Argument: Casey’s reliance analysis was inappropriate judicial activism. Courts shouldn’t maintain wrong decisions just because society has adapted to them. As Justice Alito wrote, constitutional rights shouldn’t depend on “empirical questions” about societal impact that courts lack “authority” and “expertise” to assess.
The Broader Point: Conservatives argued that Casey’s approach essentially made constitutional law unreformable—any established precedent could claim reliance interests, making judicial error permanent.
Historical Analogy: If reliance interests always trumped constitutional correction, the Court could never have overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board. Sometimes constitutional truth matters more than settled expectations.
This perspective sees Dobbs as restoring proper judicial humility—courts interpret law, they don’t manage social transitions.
The Progressive Response: Erasing Women’s Constitutional Citizenship
Progressive critics saw the Dobbs reliance analysis as constitutional erasure of women’s lived experience.
The Core Criticism: The majority’s approach systematically devalues the ways women actually live and plan their lives. By requiring reliance to be “concrete” and “contractual,” the Court privileged male-coded forms of legal relationship (marriage, property) over female-coded experiences (reproductive planning, caregiving decisions).
The Deeper Problem: The reliance analysis reflected broader problems with how constitutional law handles women's equality. As the dissent noted, the 1868 laws the majority relied on were written when women “were not understood as full members of the community embraced by the phrase ‘We the People.’”
Real-World Impact: Progressive critics emphasized the concrete ways women had structured their lives around reproductive choice:
Delaying childbearing for education and career advancement
Making location decisions based on healthcare access
Financial planning around family timing
Career investments possible only with reproductive control
The Court’s dismissal of these patterns as “generalized” struck critics as willfully blind to women’s actual experiences.
What This Means for Future Cases
Dobbs’ restrictive approach to reliance has implications far beyond abortion. If established constitutional rights can be eliminated when reliance interests are deemed too “generalized,” what does that mean for:
Contraception rights: Do women rely on Griswold in ways concrete enough to matter?
Same-sex intimacy: Is Lawrence v. Texas protected by sufficient reliance interests?
Marriage equality: Even Obergefell might be vulnerable if future Courts apply Dobbs’ restrictive reliance test
The Bigger Picture: Who Counts in Constitutional Law
The reliance analysis in Dobbs reveals something profound about American constitutional law: whose experiences matter when courts make legal decisions.
For 30 years, Casey suggested that women’s lived experiences—their actual patterns of life planning and social participation—were constitutionally relevant. Dobbs decisively rejected that approach, requiring reliance to fit traditional legal categories.
Whether you see this as constitutional correction or constitutional regression may depend on whether you think constitutional law should evolve to recognize previously marginalized experiences—or whether it should stick to formal legal categories that have deeper historical roots.
Next time: How the Supreme Court’s use of history in Dobbs is sparking a revolution in constitutional interpretation—and why both liberals and conservatives are worried about where it leads.
Do you think the Court was right to distinguish between different types of reliance? Or does the Dobbs approach systematically undervalue women’s constitutional citizenship?