Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar again in the spotlight fighting the conservative Supreme Court on abortion

For the fourth time since she became the federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is arguing an abortion-related case.

For the fourth time since she became the federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is arguing an abortion-related case. The dispute before the high court on Wednesday, about whether federal mandates for hospitals override strict state abortion bans in medical emergencies, shows how legal fights over abortion rights did not cease when the conservative majority ended a constitutional right to an abortion in 2022. In the first two abortion-related cases Prelogar argued as the Justice Department’s fourth-ranking official, both heard during the Supreme Court’s 2021 term, the conservative majority rejected her calls that abortion rights be protected. But Prelogar has eked out wins on other issues where the Biden administration was seemingly at odds with the court’s conservative proclivities, including in tussles over immigration policy and voting rights. The administration’s supporters hope that in the two abortion cases before the Supreme Court this year, Prelogar can bring at least some of the conservative justices to the federal government’s side. Lawyers with experience arguing before the high court cite Prelogar’s skills in oral arguments, as well as her strategy of putting forward legal points that will attract the support of justices who are otherwise hostile to abortion as an issue – and doing so without undermining the larger arguments in favor of access to abortion. “She has a good understanding of why access to abortion here is important, as both a practical matter and the constitutional matter,” said Stephanie Toti, a reproductive rights attorney at The Lawyering Project who argued and won a significant abortion rights case at the Supreme Court in 2016. “But at the same time, she’s put her focus on the places where she’s likely to have the most leverage with the justices.”