[johnnyo]

This is a good reminder that sometimes the plaintiff in a major decision like this often doesn’t have the strongest ideological link to the issue at hand, but the facts of their specific case made it the best exemplar to bring before the Supreme Court.

If you read about the plaintiffs in famous cases like this and others, the defendant is much different than the picture we imagine.

For example, In Plessy vs Ferguson, the railroad company opposed the idea of racial segregation of rail cars, because it meant they had to spend more money on cars for their train, and they (along with others) recruited Plessy and staged the arrest of Plessy in hopes of getting the law overturned. They even went so far as to inform the arresting party of the specific charges to bring so they’d have the best case to challenge it.

[sio8ohPi]

Lawrence vs Texas is another interesting one. It's likely that the defendants were not actually having sex at the time of their arrest. The defendants deny it, the four responding officers reported three different stories. Lambda legal persuaded them to plead no contest and fought the charges on equal protection grounds instead.

[mirimir]

> This is a good reminder that sometimes the plaintiff in a major decision like this often doesn’t have the strongest ideological link to the issue at hand ...

That's a misreading of TFA. It's not that she ever opposed abortion rights. TFA makes it clear that the just did it for the money.

[7532yahoogmail]

Which is what the guy said.

[mirimir]

I get that. But I still think that there's a distinction between "not feel strongly" and "be desperate".