Fordham Catches Flak for Honoring J. Breyer, Abortion Rights Supporter

[WSJ Law Blog]

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer at a conference of the Anti-Defamation League, April 15, 2008, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)


Justice Stephen Breyer probably didn’t think much of it when Fordham law school told him he’d be receiving the Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize at a dinner tomorrow night. But now he might be ruing his decision to accept.

Fordham alumni and Cardinal Edward Egan, the leader of the Catholic church in New York, are up in arms over Fordham handing the prize to a supporter of abortion rights. Cardinal Egan, according to the AP, has spoken to the Catholic university’s leaders to ensure “that a mistake of this sort will not happen again.”

According to the AP, more than 1,100 Fordham alumni and others have signed a petition calling for the award to be revoked. The Cardinal Newman Society, a conservative Catholic group based in Manassas, Va., is leading the protest. The group recently objected to Santa Clara University’s decision to honor former Clinton administration official and U.S. Rep. Leon Panetta. Patrick Reilly, the society’s president, has called Panetta “a leading advocate of the Culture of Death.”

The argument against Breyer — one of two Jewish justices on the Court (the other is Ruth Bader Ginsburg) — is that he wrote the majority opinion in Steinberg v. Carhart, the 2000 case that struck down a Nebraska law banning partial-birth abortion. He also dissented in a 2007 case that upheld a federal law banning the same procedure.

Fordham and Breyer did not immediately respond to the AP’s requests for comment.