"In addition to the lack of a factual record, the oral arguments were burdened by jurisdictional and procedural issues that consumed a considerable amount of time, leaving little time to focus on the substantive medical, historical, and constitutional questions. The first twenty minutes of Weddington’s first argument in Roe in December 1971 was spent on procedure and jurisdiction, an much of the last ten minutes as well. The Court asked questions such as who brought the suit, whether they could sue, whether these was any real controversy between Jane Roe and the public officials named as defendants, whether the Court should even hear the appeal, whether the parties should have gone to the federal appeals court first, whether the case was moot, whether an injunction was appropriate. A substantial part of the discussion by Jay Floyd, the attorney for Texas in the first Roe argument, was also spent on procedure and jurisdiction. In the first Doe argument, Margie Pitts Hames addressed some questions on jurisdiction and procedure, and her final question was on jurisdiction Dorothy Beasley also addressed such questions. Again, the amount of time spent on these procedural and jurisdictional questions lends considerable credence to Justice Blackmun’s story that Justice Stewart urged the subcommittee of Justices to hear Roe and Doe under the “misapprehension” that they involved “nothing more than an application of Younger v. Harris.” Indeed, the subcommittee could have been easily misled by the first papers filed in the Supreme Court by Roy Lucas and Sarah Weddington on October 6, 1970, asking the Justices to hear the case. The papers (called a “Jurisdictional Statement) consisted of thirty-three pages and presented only two “Questions” for the Justices to address, relating to the propriety of an injunction by the federal court and whether the married couple in the case (not Jan Roe) had “standing” to sue-on other words, procedural issues."
January 1, 1970