The below summarized scholarship addresses legal issues arising from the conflict between states that have penalized reproductive and gender-affirming health care and states that have protected that care through shield laws.

---

Hayley Amster, Abortion, Blocking Laws, and the Full Faith and Credit Clause, Stanford Law Review Online (2024).

This essay argues that a California shield law prohibiting compliance with out-of-state search warrants, subpoenas, or other forms of legal process relating to abortion does not violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Although the purpose of the Full Faith and Credit Clause is to ensure judgments rendered in one state are enforceable in all others, it does not require states to carry out the penal law of another state and can be overridden in some circumstances by a state’s own strongly held public policy. This essay argues that California’s shield law may fall within these recognized exceptions to the Full Faith and Credit Clause.

Lea Brilmayer, Abortion, Full Faith and Credit, and the “Judicial Power” Under Article III, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law (2024).

This article focuses on a state’s ability to enforce its anti-abortion judgments against out of-state defendants, delving deeply into the meaning, requirements, and exceptions to the Full Faith and Credit Clause to U.S. Constitution. This article argues that reproductive freedom states are not required to enforce judgments entered in states that penalize abortion because of defenses under the Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Act, and because decisions under laws like Texas’s S.B. 8—permitting uninjured parties to bring a civil suit against someone involved in abortion—are unlikely to qualify as “judicial” proceedings necessitating compliance with the Full Faith and Credit Clause.

Darryl K. Brown, Extraterritorial State Criminal Law, Post-Dobbs, The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (2024).

This article applies the principles of state extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction to laws that target abortion services beyond a state’s own borders. The article observes that cross-border enforcement depends on state cooperation in extraditing defendants and obtaining out-of-state evidence and witness testimony. Yet, because federal law requires only that states fulfill other states’ extradition requests for “fugitives,” and those who violate a state’s criminal law while in another state are not fugitives, reproductive freedom states can refuse to extradite their residents for other states’ abortion-related prosecutions. The article argues that the constitutional parameters of extraterritorial prosecutions will be one of the new battlegrounds in the post-Dobbs world.

Alejandra Carabello, Cynthia Conti-Cook, Yveka Pierra, Michelle McGrath, and Hillary Aaron, Extradition in Post-Roe America, City University of New York Law Review (2023).

Within the context of abortion criminalization and policing, this article analyzes how extradition, and the safe harbor shield law statutes that attempt to address it, are translated into practice under realistic conditions. The article looks to principles guiding international extradition and argues that human rights considerations and the requirement of dual criminality—that extradition is granted only for crimes regarded as serious in both nations—should also apply to U.S. interstate extradition. The article argues that state system actors will still have discretion within the strongest safe harbors to subvert the safety of pregnant people and people supporting them, and thus proposes a set of incentives to state-based actors to uphold their state’s protections.

David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché, Abortion Pills, Stanford Law Review (2024).

This article explores the novel issues raised by the abortion bans in roughly a third of the country and the wide availability of abortion pills throughout the United States. The Article details anti-abortions strategies to end access to abortion pills, including attempts to target both those who take abortion pills and those who help others access them, and the opposing movement to increase access to abortion pills, including through abortion shield laws that protect cross-border telehealth.

David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouché, The New Abortion Battleground, Columbia Law Review (2023).

This article covers the transformation of abortion rights, law, and access, as some states enacted laws creating civil or criminal liability for out-of-state abortion travel while others passed laws insulating their providers from out-of-state prosecutions. The article provides insights into shield laws that abortion-supportive states may pass to protect their providers against professional discipline, investigations, lawsuits, and prosecutions. The article also discusses the federal government’s ability to use federal laws to preempt state bans and use federal land to shelter abortion services.

Mary Fan, Shielding Freedoms: State Noncooperation in Hunts for Evidence and People to Protect Rights, Washington Law Review (2025).

This article analyzes the rise of shield laws that prohibit law enforcement and companies from complying with subpoenas seeking witnesses or other evidence in the investigation or prosecution of abortion or gender-affirming care. Drawing on historical cases, the article argues that interstate comity is not an absolute principle. The article proposes expanding shield laws to cover new challenges, such as the use of automated license plate reader databases to search for people trying to exercise reproductive rights across state lines.

Ethan Lowens, Interstate Extradition, Wisconsin Law Review (2026).

This article discusses the extradition conflict that arises from states criminalizing abortion and gender-affirming care expressly protected in other states, including by shield laws. This article argues that the federal government declined to enforce federal extradition law from the nation’s founding until the Supreme Court decided Puerto Rico v. Branstad in 1987, and states created laws and practices that diverged from federal law, including by allowing governors to refuse extradition demands on equitable grounds. The article undertakes an original analysis of newspaper coverage of equitable extradition refusals and finds that governors used the power judiciously, refusing extradition rarely. The article argues that the state-driven regime of extradition discretion succeeded in policing itself, and that states may turn to this history and tradition to circumvent the U.S. Constitutions’ extradition requirements.

Paul Schiff Berman, Roey Goldstein, and Sophie Leff, Conflicts of Law and the Abortion War between the States, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2024).

This article provides a survey of how state versus state conflict of law issues may be resolved in the abortion context. The article argues that liability imposed on a pregnant person seeking abortion may be challenged under the Privileges and Immunities Clause or as a violation of the constitutional right to travel, and liability imposed on a healthcare provider may be challenged under the Commerce Clause. The article also addresses other legal issues that arise as to whether states can impose civil liability on out-of-state acts or actors, including questions of jurisdiction, choice of law, and judgment recognition.

Lindsay F. Wiley, States as Shields, Minnesota Law Review (2025).

Analyzing shield laws that aim to protect health care providers from the punitive actions of out-of-state officials, this article develops complementary interpretations of Full Faith and Credit Clause requirements for states and anticommandeering and anticoercion limits on federal power that share a foundation in the doctrine of parens patriae. The article argues that the Supreme Court’s parens patriae precedents offer an untapped source of guidance for understanding the role states play in shielding their residents from harm, including with respect to reproductive and gender-affirming health care. The article provides arguments that federal judges could use to uphold shield laws and state judges could use to defend their authority to decline to recognize out-of-state judgments that arise from bans on reproductive and gender-affirming health care.

Diego A. Zambrano, Mariah E. Mastrodimos, and Sergio F.Z. Valente, The Full Faith and Credit Clause and the Puzzle of Abortion Laws, New York University Law Review Online (2023).

This Essay argues that California’s shield law prohibiting its courts from serving as a venue or enforcing judgments for claims against people for providing, receiving, or assisting in abortion complies with the Full Faith and Credit Clause (FFC) of the U.S. Constitution. The Essay considers the constitutionality of California shield law in relation to claims under Texas’s S.B. 8, a law allowing private parties to enforce the state’s ban on performing or aiding abortion. The Essay argues that California may defend the constitutionality of the shield law’s venue provision under the FFC’s public policy exception and the shield law’s judgment enforcement bar under the FFC’s penal judgment exception.

Carleen Zubrzycki, The Abortion Interoperability Trap, The Yale Law Journal Forum (2022).

This essay identifies a gap in legislatures’ efforts to shield patients’ medical records from being used in litigation and prosecutions against abortion and gender-affirming care: as medical records follow the patient, including back to an anti-abortion state, those records are likely to end up in the hands of actors who are not subject to shield laws and who can easily be required to hand over the records to law enforcement or private litigants. The essay provides potential solutions, including steps that states, federal regulators, and private entities could take to better protect records, without burdening patient care.

Carleen Zubrzycki, Torts (?) Arms Races: Abortion and Beyond, DePaul Law Review (2024).

Both sides of the abortion issue have turned to novel causes of action to promote their agendas: anti-abortion states like Texas rely on bounty-hunter style causes of action that allow anyone to sue even without any personal stake in an abortion, while abortion-protective states have passed shield laws, including some that create “claw-back” causes of action authorizing those who lose Texas-style lawsuits to sue to reclaim any damages and expenses they incurred in those suits. This essay explores how each type of statute relates to the broader civil litigation landscape and the costs of deploying novel private litigation in this setting.