What I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism

Updated at 8:07 a.m. ET on September 26, 2023

Like many women activists of my generation, I came of age politically by joining in the fight over reproductive rights. In 1986, I boarded a bus packed with other college students and rode from New Haven to Washington, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign that urged the Supreme Court to preserve Roe v. Wade. Later, in law school, I came to believe two things about the American legal system. First, its crowning achievement was the expansion of constitutional rights during the postwar New Deal era. In the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, protected the rights of criminal defendants, and put teeth on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other landmark decisions. And, of course, there was Roe.

The second thing my classmates and I learned was that this achievement was under assault by a conservative backlash. The same forces that powered Ronald Reagan into office in 1980 were seeking to curtail many of the constitutional rights secured by the courts in the postwar era. That’s why, early in my career, I took a job as the legal director of NARAL