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Every landmark ruling has a name attached to it. But behind every name is a person who never asked to make history. Who simply tried to live their life, and found the full force of the American legal system waiting at the door.

Precedent is a seven-part prestige limited series that takes viewers inside the Supreme Court cases that defined modern American freedom, and the extraordinary ordinary people at the heart of them. 

Each episode is its own world. A distinct era, a distinct cast of characters, a distinct legal and cultural battleground. Together they form one of the most compelling narrative arcs in American history: the decades-long fight for privacy, autonomy and equality, and the single Supreme Court ruling that threatened to unravel it all.

Episode 1: Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)

A Planned Parenthood director is arrested for giving contraception to married couples. The case that first established a constitutional right to privacy, and set everything that follows in motion.

Episode 2: Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972)

A reproductive rights activist faces prosecution in Massachusetts for handing out contraceptives at a public lecture. The courts are forced to confront a question Griswold left unanswered: is privacy a right for everyone, or just the married?

Episode 3: Roe v. Wade (1973)

A young single mother becomes the face of the most divisive legal battle in American history. A case that would define the fault lines of the country for the next fifty years, built on the courage of a woman most people never really knew.

Episode 4: Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)

Pennsylvania passes a sweeping abortion restriction. Planned Parenthood fights back. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's ruling leaves Roe technically intact, but the architecture has begun to crack.

Episode 5: Lawrence v. Texas (2003)

Two men are arrested in their own bedroom under Texas's anti-sodomy law. Their case reaches Washington, where Justice Scalia's moral conservatism collides head-on with Justice Kennedy's defence of dignity and privacy in one of the court's most charged confrontations.

Episode 6: Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)

Jim Obergefell sues the state of Ohio for refusing to recognise his marriage to his terminally ill husband. A love story that becomes the defining civil rights case of a generation.

Episode 7: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022)

The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. The series comes full circle. Fifty years of precedent, undone. And the question that hangs over everything that came before it: if Roe could fall, what's next?

The through-line from Griswold to Dobbs carries the weight and momentum of a thriller, because the audience already knows how it ends, and watches in growing dread as each episode edges closer to that moment. These are the real people behind the case names. The ones who were never asked if they wanted to make history.

Precedent is the story of America's conscience, told through the individuals who were forced to become its test cases.

FORMAT: 7 x 60 minutes
GENRE: Legal Drama / Political Drama
STATUS: In Development
CREATED BY: Josh Harris

Scotland, 1724. 

An unmarried woman who concealed a pregnancy was automatically presumed guilty of murder if the infant died. No evidence required. No trial that mattered. Silence alone was a hanging offence.

Maggie Dickson is a Musselburgh fishwife. She has spent her life obeying the rules that govern women in 18th century Scotland: keep quiet, endure hardship, survive another winter. When her husband James is seized by a British Navy press gang and swallowed into the North Sea fog, that life ends overnight.

Displaced and entirely alone, Maggie travels south through winter roads and finds work at a remote roadside inn where violence is ordinary and men own everything in the room. When a brutal stillbirth during a storm leaves her with an impossible choice, she makes the only decision she can. It is not enough to save her.

The Kirk condemns her. The courts sentence her. A crowd gathers in Edinburgh's Grassmarket to watch her hang.

The rope goes taut. The crowd roars. The cadaver brokers descend.

Hours later, beneath the lid of her own coffin, Maggie wakes.

Under Scots law, she has fulfilled her sentence. She was hanged. The law never specified until dead. In slipping through the fingers of every institution that tried to own her, Maggie Dickson has done something no one can explain, and no one can ignore. To some she is proof of divine intervention. To others, an offence against the natural order. To the courts, a problem that has no clean answer.

To herself, she is simply trying to find her way home.

Half Hangit Maggie is a three-part limited series that tells the true story of the only woman in Scottish history the law could not kill twice. Set across three distinct acts, it follows Maggie from the loss of James through the brutality of the courts and the gallows, to the impossible reckoning of her resurrection 

and return.

Part One: The Storm traces Maggie's journey from Musselburgh to the roadside inn at Kelso, through pregnancy, stillbirth and arrest, ending with the doors of the Tolbooth slamming shut behind her.

Part Two: The Noose puts Maggie on trial before a city that has already decided her guilt, strips her publicly in the Kirk, drags her through the streets and hangs her before thousands in the Grassmarket.

Part Three: Resurrection begins inside the coffin. Maggie wakes, claws her way back into a world that does not know where to put her, returns to a home hollowed out by absence, and waits for a knock at the door that she is not sure will ever come.

At its heart, this is a love story. Not a grand romance but something quieter and more durable: shared bread, salt air, a flower pressed between the pages of a diary, a promise made on a harbour in the fog. The question running beneath every scene is not whether Maggie will survive the rope. It is whether the life she and James built together has survived everything else.

Rooted in historical fact, shot through with folk horror, and grounded in the visual textures of 18th century Scotland, Half Hangit Maggie is the story of a woman who was failed by every institution designed to protect her and outlasted all of them anyway.

FORMAT: 3 x 60 minutes
GENRE: Historical Drama / Folk Drama
STATUS: In Development
CREATED BY: Josh Harris