Nearly four months have passed since the leak of Justice Samuel Alito's opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health and we're apparently no closer to knowing who did it and how. We also don't know why the leaker did it, though that's probably less important for repairing the damage done to the Supreme Court. Of course, if the most likely explanation is true, that a left-wing clerk was trying to shame one of the members of the majority to pull back from overturning Roe v. Wade, then the gambit backfired spectacularly, instead steeling the Justices' spines—and thus could serve as an object lesson to disincentivize future leaks.
This isn't just a parlor game, some judicial version of Clue ("A Sotomayor clerk using Signal on a burner phone"). It's not about filling in a footnote for future law review articles or some history book written 50 years hence. It's about enforcing consequences for an unprecedented hit to the Court's legitimacy.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Newsweek