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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Supreme Court keeps overturning precedent. It swears that it's not
As the Supreme Court was barreling toward the final weeks of its term last year, Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public appearance to defend his colleagues from criticism that they were all too eager to kick decades-old precedent to the curb.
Still bruising from anger on the left over the courts monumental decision three years earlier to overturn Roe v. Wade, Roberts rattled off a series of stats underscoring that his court the Roberts court had taken aim at far fewer precedents than any of its modern predecessors, an average of less than two overrulings each year.
I think people have a misunderstanding about how much the current court is overruling precedent, Roberts told an audience at Georgetown University Law Center.
But just 10 days after he walked offstage, the Supreme Court let stand President Donald Trumps firing of two senior labor officials despite a 1935 precedent known as Humphreys Executor that for decades has protected the leaders of independent agencies from dismissal by a president without cause.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supreme-court-keeps-overturning-precedent-100051109.html
Who you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?
struggle4progress
(126,597 posts)Irish_Dem
(82,090 posts)Igel
(37,607 posts)our brains remember some of it,
and our brains recall mostly what's convenient and 'fits' with other things we take as fact.
In other words, we're unreliable witnesses. That's been demonstrated so many times that it's amazing that everybody doesn't know it. (Oh, wait. What I said.)
Somebody did the counting not that long back. IIRC, from 2017 to present, they'd overturned 2.2 precedents per year (although that almost certainly doesn't include last week's, so maybe that's up to 2.3 now). That 2.2 was considerably on the low side of historical norms.
A lot of precedents that are overturned aren't all that important, so we don't notice them. Heck, for the most part I'm a good chunk of Americans aren't that into the overturning of the '86 case that we saw a few days back.