LIFE and death issues often reach the Supreme Court, and this year is no exception. In recent weeks the justices issued countervailing decisions concerning the death penalty, both by 8-1 votes: they rapped Florida on the knuckles for giving judges, not juries, the final word on whether convicts should be executed and restored death sentences for three Kansas inmates who complained that their juries were given faulty instructions. On March 2nd, the justices will hear a challenge to a Texas law that effectively shuts down up to three-quarters of the state’s abortion clinics.

These are big, particularly the abortion case, and they jostle with pending cases involving public-sector unions, religious liberty, voting rights and affirmative action. It’s going to be another heated June, when the justices tend to release their most-talked-about decisions. (Last year, Obamacare and same-sex marriage were the two blockbusters.) But on January 25th, the justices quietly turned down two opportunities to revisit long-standing precedents on abortion and the death penalty. The demurrals are notable because several members of the court have explicitly or implicitly invited these challenges in previous dissenting opinions. It seems that the nine may have, for one reason or another, drawn themselves a line they’re not willing to cross. The orders of January 25th may be a sign they feel a tad skittish about extending their hand still further into America’s most contentious disputes.

Start with the death penalty. Last year, Justice Stephen Breyer penned a dissent to a ruling upholding Oklahoma’s method of executing criminals that questioned the whole enterprise of capital punishment. “[R]ather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time”, Justice Breyer wrote, “I would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution”. What followed was a 41-page sketch of such a brief. All the evidence shows that the death penalty risks killing innocents, brings unconscionable delays between conviction and execution and is imposed arbitrarily and unreliably. It’s no wonder, Justice Breyer wrote, that the ultimate penalty has been abandoned in so many countries.

One would think Justice Breyer would have welcomed Walter v Pennsylvania, a case brought by Shonda Walter, a black woman and the only female death-row inmate in Pennsylvania. Ms Walter was sentenced to die for killing an elderly man in 2003. In her lawyer’s petition to the justices, Daniel Silverman wrote that Ms Walter’s “case exemplifies what is wrong with the death penalty”:

She was ill-served by counsel, leaving serious questions about her guilt and eligibility for the death penalty; she has already spent ten years in isolation, and her case has barely progressed; she emerged from an arbitrary process which fails to limit the death penalty to the worst offenders; and joined a mostly black death row, the country’s fifth largest, as a product of a system that even a state supreme court committee has acknowledged is plagued by racial discrimination.

Widening the lens from Ms Walter’s situation, Mr Silverman called America’s death-penalty system “imperfect in application, haphazard in result and of negligible utility”. It is “no longer constitutionally sustainable”. This analysis matches many of the complaints Justice Breyer noted with capital punishment in his dissent, which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined, last June. And as recently as one week ago, Justice Breyer reiterated his call for a “the need to reconsider the validity of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment”. It takes four votes to hear a case, and presumably Justice Breyer had only two. But why did he let the court’s refusal to hear Walter pass in silence? Justices are free to note their disagreement with a denial and sometimes explain their dissent in writing. It could be that Justice Breyer finds another pending petition to be a better vehicle, but Walter seemed to be just the case he was calling for.

It’s not only the court’s left wing that remained quiet on January 25th when litigants served up a case on a silver platter. On the right, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito have expressed their doubts about Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision recognising a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability (the point when the fetus can survive outside the womb, about 24 weeks). Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were more explicit in an opinion they joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1992. “We believe that Roe was wrongly decided”, the dissent reads. “[I]t can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases”.

Given this flat-out willingness to abandon Roe, it is something of a surprise that not a single justice expressed a desire to review the eighth circuit’s ruling in Stenehjem v MKB Management Corp.In Stenehjem, three judges struck down a North Dakota law banning abortion at the first sign of a fetal heartbeat. This highly restrictive law was precluded, the panel held, under the Supreme Court’s Roe ruling and subsequent decisions. But the judges did not stop there. They spent another few pages explaining why the Supreme Court should “re-evaluate its jurisprudence” with regard to abortion rights. The fetal viability standard at the heart of Roe and its progeny has “proven unsatisfactory because it gives too little consideration to the ‘substantial state interest in potential life throughout pregnancy’”, the judges wrote. It’s high time for the Supreme Court to reject that standard so that North Dakota and other states are free to pass laws protecting fetuses earlier in pregnancy.

The four conservative justices could have brought this case onto their docket all by themselves, but they did not. It could be they just don’t think Justice Anthony Kennedy would join them in a ruling to overturn Roe. Or it could be that one or two of the four conservatives are not, in fact, adamantly opposed to Roe. Another (much more remote) possibility is that the anti-abortion positions of Justices Scalia and Thomas have softened over the past two decades. A cynical (but not so far-fetched) interpretation is that the conservatives kept quiet for fear of injecting more talk of the Supreme Court and abortion into the presidential race. But whatever the closed-door tactics, supporters of abortion rights have reason, for now, to breathe a little easier after the order of January 25th. As with the death-penalty challenge that wasn’t, not a single justice dissented from the denial.