Abstract
The Dobbs decision writes into U.S. jurisprudence patriarchy’s “unwritten law,” deciphered by Ida B. Wells with respect to racialized lynching. Its effect undermines a robust free speech regime by sequestering the female sexed body, both as a body part, and as vitally, democratically necessary, mediating signifier and symbol. When properly enabled, by means of a vaginal signifier (beyond a phallocratic paternal law), another “unwritten law” becomes illuminated, grounded not in a patriarchal symbolic but instead in an ethics of the real. Feminine law, foundational to both the First Amendment and psychoanalysis’s fundamental rule, offers a pathway for reproductive freedom and for the birth of Otherness, beyond theocratic/autocratic reproduction of the white masculinist same.