re: #457 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

To actually establish if the Supreme Court has a tendency to overrule previous Supreme Courts rulings, you’d have to determine the number of Supreme Court cases that involved such cases, and then see how many times they overruled themselves and how many times they didn’t. You’d also need to know how many times they refused to hear a previous SC-ruled case, affirming it. That’d give you an idea of how often they overrule themselves.

However, this data is not necessarily that useful, since the Supreme Court is a living institution, whose behavior may or may not be consistent over time, so dividing it up into cohorts would be useful, too. The tendencies might run one way for a period of time, and then another way for another period.

Other than that, no back-of-the-envelope glance is going to actually tell you much of anything.

If you look at the list of Supreme Court cases that have overturned previous SC rulings:

en.wikipedia.org

You’ll note that there do tend to be clusters. like the spate in the 60s and 80s overturning fourth amendment cases. There’s also recently, famously, Citizens United.

So without the data I’ve talked about, how rare it is for them to overturn is an unknown, but it’s certainly something that happens.

Statistics with cohorts and all that hardly seems to undermine that for the time being, pending at least a district court win against the 2nd, it’s the law and we should discuss it in that context.

It happens sometimes. We both knew that all along and I still question the relevance of that fact. When the law is on your side you get to say so until that law changes. When the law is against your view you get to complain about it. About 121 cases overturned. But how many decisions (including letting lower courts stand) have there been in that time? 50 a year or so? Over an awful lot of years….

How many took away the individual right finding from edit any of the bill of rights? After all that is a lot different than some of the relatively minor adjustments that show up in the list.