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By a vote of 5-to-4, the court’s most conservative members upheld, for now, a Texas law that, in effect, bans abortions after about six weeks. But almost as important as the result was how the court reached its decision — without full briefing and arguments before any court.

The court majority, including its three Trump appointees, emphasized that it was not ruling on the issues presented in the case. Still, it refused to block the law from going into effect for procedural reasons. The unsigned court order was just one long paragraph in length. And within a day, state legislators in Florida and elsewhere announced plans to introduce copycat legislation in their states.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who has dissented from almost every decision upholding expansive abortion rights, disagreed this time. He called the Texas law unprecedented because it not only bans abortions after roughly six weeks, but delegates enforcement powers not to state officials but to the general “populace at large.” Roberts noted that the law appears to be deliberately structured to prevent courts from being able to promptly consider the constitutionality of the law.

Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already asking on their websites for tips about those who are aiding or abetting abortions after about six weeks. Just how far the language of the statute may reach remains unclear. But it could possibly include family members, a receptionist at a clinic, someone who drives a patient to a clinic or even an out-of-state doctor who via telemedicine prescribes abortion pills.

Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf observes that the public-enforcement provision of the law could have some ugly consequences.

“The creation of a kind of Stasi,” he says, in reference to the communist-era secret police in East Germany. “An East German-type society in which everybody is informing on everybody else.”

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