For all his perceived reliability as a conservative bulwark, Luttig could befuddle the political right. He ruled that Title IX protected a female place-kicker on an all-male football team from gender discrimination. He upheld a Black defendant’s right to exclude a White juror who had displayed the Confederate flag. And in 2000 he declared that the constitutional right to abortion established with Roe v. Wade had achieved the status of “super-stare decisis” — a term of his coining — because the Supreme Court said it had repeatedly upheld the case and that it was irrefutably embedded in the law at the time.

For all his perceived reliability as a conservative bulwark, Luttig could befuddle the political right. He ruled that Title IX protected a female place-kicker on an all-male football team from gender discrimination. He upheld a Black defendant’s right to exclude a White juror who had displayed the Confederate flag. And in 2000 he declared that the constitutional right to abortion established with Roe v. Wade had achieved the status of “super-stare decisis” — a term of his coining — because the Supreme Court said it had repeatedly upheld the case and that it was irrefutably embedded in the law at the time.