Stanley N. Katz, Scholar and Citizen: An Introduction

I first interviewed Stanley N. Katz in the fall of 2020. I had returned to teaching after a fellowship year at Princeton University with the Program in Law and Public Affairs. That year was interrupted by the outbreak of COVID-19, which drove me home to Vermont from New Jersey—but not before I had the opportunity to present my research on the New York State-based origins of the constitutional abortion rights ultimately endorsed in Roe v. Wade . Katz confirmed my sense of the importance of the late-1960s and early-1970s New York story, and more general emphasis on the state-level and statutory origins of Roe , by commenting that when he was teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, advocates of expanded abortion access like himself looked to New York as the model for what they might be able to achieve in Illinois. “We never,” he said, “expected the Supreme Court to bail us out.” 1