For a swing justice to defect now and rule in any manner short of cleanly overruling Roe and Casey would be to give the leaker and his/her street brawler allies a massive win. And it would be a win from which the Court would likely never recover for the remainder of its history. If the American Founding-era idea of a “government of laws, not of men” means anything at all, it means that the judiciary—our most cloistered and “least dangerous” governmental branch—cannot be subject to mobocracy the likes of which Lincoln warned about in 1838. To defect now would be to permanently incentivize opinion leaks in the future—and even the mild proliferation of these leaks would paralyze the Court and prevent its normal day-to-day operations. One ought to not negotiate with terrorists, and the swing justices in Dobbs ought to not “negotiate” with the reprehensible leaker.

We are in uncharted waters, at this point. All eyes remain on the chief justice, to see if he can find a way—any way—to restore to the Court a semblance of that which he has long cherished most, its perceived institutional integrity. That could prove to be an uphill battle; the leak really is that devastating. But there is one easy way for Chief Justice Roberts to do so: Join Justice Alito’s courageous coalition and send the bloody Roe and Casey precedents to the ash heap of history in clarion 6-3 fashion.