"Robertson, more than any other Supreme Court decision, supports the view that the thirteenth amendment does not prohibit forced childbearing. But later cases have invalidated all four of Robertson’s arguments. The peonage cases squarely hold that a state “may not directly or indirectly command involuntary servitude, even if it was voluntarily contracted for.” As for “services which have from time immemorial been treated as exceptional,” both the Supreme Court and the lower courts have largely neglected this phrase, probably because it simply makes no sense; how can there be an exception that antedates the rule?197 The public necessity requirement seems to have been considerably tightened in Butler and Jacobson. And we know that has become of the idea that women are incompetents who may therefore properly be subjected to the absolute authority of their fathers and husbands. The sounder view would seem to be that of the dissenting Justice Harlan, who called the Court’s decision “judicial legislation” and concluded that “[a] condition of enforced service, even for a limited period, in the private service of another, is a condition of involuntary servitude.” Here, as in another, better known Civil War amendments case, Harlan’s lone dissent seems to have prevailed over brown’s majority opinion. Robertson, although it has never expressly been overruled, stands as a decision whose rationale has evaporated from under it."