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When Donald Trump won a second term in office, experts predicted that it was only a matter of time before a civil war of litigation around abortion broke out between the states. Apparently, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wasn’t willing to wait anymore. Last week, Texas filed a lawsuit against Margaret Daley Carpenter, a physician and member of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, for mailing pills to patients in the state. Paxton is seeking massive penalties against Carpenter for practicing medicine without a license in the state and violating state abortion laws, but the case got started more simply: A man learned that his partner’s miscarriage was actually an abortion. If this sounds simple, don’t be fooled. The suit will raise messy questions about which state’s law applies and when it is unconstitutional for one state to ignore rulings from another. Paxton may have just opened a legal Pandora’s box, but it’s part of much broader plans we should expect to see unfold in the new year—led by men just like the one who gave Paxton this case.

Messiness aside, there’s a reason Paxton led with this suit. New York’s shield law, which is designed to protect doctors and others who help abortion seekers, authorizes anyone who gets sued for engaging in protected conduct around reproductive rights to bring a so-called clawback lawsuit against the person targeting them. But because the federal Constitution makes states immune from most kinds of lawsuits, it will be harder for Carpenter to go after Texas.

That doesn’t mean that Paxton’s suit is a slam dunk,........

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