In this column, erstwhile attorney and GQ staff writer Jay Willis untangles the messy intersection of law, politics, and culture.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court released its opinion in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, in which the Court's five-justice conservative bloc determined that state governments enjoy sovereign immunity—that is, they cannot be sued as a matter of law—in both their own state's courts and in the courts of other states, too.

This case is notable not only because of its implications for the future of litigating certain interstate civil claims. To reach its conclusion in Hyatt, the majority first had to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court case that reached the opposite conclusion, over the vociferous protestations of the four-justice liberal minority. At a moment when anti-choice activists are working diligently to get a case before the Court that will allow its five conservative justices to overturn the 46-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade, thereby gutting abortion rights in this country, Hyatt functions as a tidy preview of that coming showdown. And the result should make pro-choice advocates very nervous.

When issuing opinions, judges (generally) adhere to a principle called stare decisis, which refers to the notion that they should rule in a given case according to the rulings they (and other judges) issued in similar cases in the past. This reliance on precedent provides simple, common-sense benefits: It leads to consistent and predictable judicial outcomes, reduces the number of disputes that result in actual litigation, and allows for the coherent, long-term development of law. (Imagine how useless the legal system would be if, for example, every judge resolved every case based only on their feelings about the facts at hand, and without any relevant points of reference.)

Since the Supreme Court established in Roe that the Fourteenth Amendment protects a woman's right to choose, it is stare decisis that has protected this ruling from decades of attacks mounted by the conservative movement. To date, the Court has declined every opportunity to overrule itself, which means that lower-court federal judges hearing abortion cases—even judges who quietly find the anti-choice argument to be more convincing—must uphold Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 decision that narrowly affirmed Roe, too. During his confirmation hearings last year, Brett Kavanaugh dutifully acknowledged that Roe is "settled and a precedent of the Supreme Court," and is "entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis."

In Hyatt, however, this Court's five conservative justices lay out a clear framework for when they might feel it appropriate to abandon precedent. Stare decisis, writes Justice Clarence Thomas, is "not an inexorable command." (Kavanaugh's proclamation, you will note, acknowledges the existence of settled law but makes no promises about how he would treat it as a Supreme Court justice.) Next, Thomas's opinion lists the factors that, he says, justify overturning precedent in Hyatt and in similar cases: When the old opinion's reasoning is of dubious quality, for example, and inconsistent with related decisions, and has been affected by subsequent matters that have come before the Court.

Again, the application of these factors to interstate sovereign immunity does not make for especially compelling reading. But it is easy to see how the same justices might use the same list to overturn Roe and Casey or, at the very least, to render those cases' promises meaningless. Liberals and conservatives alike have long criticized Roe as a sloppily written opinion—an example of judges arriving at their preferred conclusion and then reverse-engineering a legal explanation for it. Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has referred to Roe as an episode of "heavy-handed judicial intervention" that, she believes, galvanized the anti-choice movement and made it more difficult for pro-choice activists to secure abortion rights via the legislative process. Applying this logic, the Court's conservatives could declare Roe to be legally unsound—too awkward and unwieldy to function as precedent any longer.