Summary

The 24 June 2022 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, by which the court found that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion, and by which it overturned the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, has caused a sharp response in US society. The decision does not include the resolution of a single point of law, instead reflecting the worldview of the Supreme Court justices, which the majority of the Supreme Court wants to impose on society as a whole.

Estonian judges are prohibited from belonging to political parties, and the worldview of judges remains unknown to society. Occasionally the worldview of a few Supreme Court justices is glimpsed in their dissenting opinions, but that is all. This begs the question of whether Estonian justices lack a worldview or whether their worldview influences their judgments (following, for example, the Continental European legal system, where judges have less discretion). However, if a justice has a worldview, and this is inevitably reflected in the justice’s decision (as the author of this article is also arguing), would it not be fairer to society for the justice to express that worldview?

In jurisprudence, we cannot permit a certain part of the process of developing a judicial decision to fall outside of the scientific perspective. Namely, the author of this article is claiming that certain worldviews not discussed in Estonian legal literature already exist. The author is convinced that if the worldview of justices in Estonia is denied, the court system may at some point fail to realise what has hit it. Lessons should also be learnt from the experiences of other countries. In fact, it is in the United States of America where this issue has been addressed most often in legal literature. The article only focuses on the main worldview positions.