The rest area on Interstate 40 west of Memphis got a new bench on Tuesday. The bench is for laws. We put it there after our study found most of them stop at about that point.
Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana have asked the Supreme Court to let their abortion laws reach doctors in California, Massachusetts and New York. We wanted to know if a law can make that trip. So we loaded six of them into a sealed van and drove north.
We used a control group. That is a set of laws we left at home in Montgomery to see if they did anything on their own. They did not. The six travelling laws began to fade near the Tennessee line. By Memphis they were asleep. One woke briefly in Kentucky, asked where it was, and went back under.
"A law is a sentence that works in one place," said Dr. Imogen Harrow, who did the maths. "We measured how far. The answer is to the border. After that it is just a sentence."
