Murrill Takes the Fight Over Abortion Pills Straight to the Supreme Court
Liz Murrill stood before reporters Wednesday and made an argument that ought to resonate anywhere people still believe in state sovereignty: a state that won't hand over a doctor accused of shipping abortion pills into Louisiana has no credible claim to hand over someone shipping guns into Louisiana illegally. That was her comparison, and it is not a bad one. Louisiana's attorney general, joined by her counterparts in Alabama and Arkansas, filed suit this week against California, New York and Massachusetts, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the shield laws those states built to protect abortion providers from exactly the kind of enforcement Louisiana has tried, twice, to carry out.
The facts are not complicated, even if the legal theory is dense. After Dobbs overturned Roe in 2022, states like Louisiana restricted abortion. States like New York, California and Massachusetts responded by passing shield laws designed to insulate doctors who prescribe abortion drugs from out-of-state investigations and extradition requests. Louisiana has tested those shields twice and lost both times. A Louisiana grand jury indicted New York physician Margaret Carpenter after she allegedly prescribed abortion drugs that ended up with a pregnant Louisiana teenager. Governor Kathy Hochul refused extradition, cited New York's shield law, and New York then went further, changing its law so prescribers of abortion medication can keep their names off the label entirely. Louisiana also sought California physician Remy Coeytaux over similar allegations. Governor Gavin Newsom refused that request too.
Murrill's team did not stop at paperwork. Investigators in the three plaintiff states ran controlled purchases of abortion drugs online, in some cases providing false information about the buyer or the pregnancy, according to Murrill. That is the kind of legwork that turns a policy dispute into a real enforcement case with real facts behind it.
The plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to take this case directly rather than grinding through the lower courts first, and here is where it gets interesting. Murrill says the Constitution obligates the Court to accept original jurisdiction in disputes between states. She is not alone in that reading. Justices Alito and Thomas have both taken the position that the Court's jurisdiction in these cases is mandatory, not discretionary. The prevailing practice, though, treats it as discretionary, and that gap between legal theory and current practice is exactly what Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas are now asking the Court to close.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin framed the stakes plainly: the dispute is, in his words, "in large part, about fulfilling what Dobbs ... was about, which is each state deciding through their duly elected representatives what the law of those states are going to be and enforcing that law." Alabama's Steve Marshall put it even more bluntly: "Who gets to decide?" His answer is that Alabama's elected representatives have declared abortion unlawful, and Alabama has both the responsibility and the legal standing to enforce that law.
That is the whole case in a sentence, and it deserves to be taken seriously by people who have never thought much about abortion politics at all. Set aside where you land on the underlying question of abortion. The issue here is whether a state like New York can pass a law that functions as a shield against another state's criminal process, effectively nullifying Louisiana's ability to enforce its own statutes within its own borders. Murrill's gun analogy lands because it strips away the abortion framing and gets to the structural question underneath: does one state get to run interference for people breaking another state's laws, simply by declaring its own laws supreme?
Louisiana voters banned abortion through their elected legislature. That is how self-government is supposed to work. If New York and California can nullify that outcome by shielding providers who mail pills across state lines, then the Dobbs decision becomes a hollow victory, a states' rights ruling that states cannot actually act on. Murrill, Griffin and Marshall are asking the Supreme Court to settle a narrower question: whether one state can refuse to answer for crimes committed against another. They are asking it to decide whether states still mean anything when they pass laws that the federal government, under Dobbs, explicitly left to them.
The Supreme Court now has to decide whether to even hear the case. Given the stakes Murrill has laid out, and given that two sitting justices have already said jurisdiction here is not optional, it is hard to see how the Court avoids this one for long.