State Courts, Public Opinion, and the Changing Abortion Landscape after <i>Dobbs</i>

The June 24, 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization represented a seismic shift in abortion policy in the United States. Since then, state courts have begun playing an integral role in expanding or restricting abortion access in their jurisdictions. What do these cases look like and how does the public respond to court decisions that are pro- or anti-abortion? We collect original data on state court abortion cases post- Dobbs and field two survey experiments pre- and post- Dobbs to investigate these questions. We find state courts have expanded their scope in abortion policy and that pro-abortion court decisions are consistently popular. Anti-abortion court decisions, however, are increasingly unpopular. Our paper suggests that state courts are a new vital venue for abortion policymaking and that the public is growing frustrated with the countermajoritarian tendencies of courts.