“Maybe that’s what shakes up the Court, the realization that we can’t be Nazi Germany.” 3. Schultz wonders if the rapid about-face had something to do with the atrocities committed by Germany based on religious persecution. Writing for the majority, Justice Robert Jackson wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” But it was also one of the most beautifully written opinions I’ve ever read.” “The court issued what was an incredibly unpopular opinion during a war-that you can’t require people to salute the flag. “That’s a pretty dramatic reversal,” says Schultz. But this time, the justices ruled 6-3 for the family’s right to freely express their religious beliefs. Barnette (1943), more Jehovah’s Witnesses were expelled from school after they refused to salute the flag. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. was at war with both Germany and Japan, the Supreme Court issued the opposite ruling in a nearly identical case. In an 8-1 ruling, the justices ruled 8-1 against the Gobitis family, saying that "national cohesion" was "inferior to none in the hierarchy of legal values," and that national unity was "the basis of national security." Religious expression, in other words, took a back seat to patriotism.īut just two years later, after the U.S. The Gobitis family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and their religion prohibited it. In this anxious atmosphere, the Supreme Court heard the case of Lillian and William Gobitis, two children from Pennsylvania who were expelled from school when they refused to salute the flag. should join the fight against Nazi Germany. In 1940, there was impassioned debate about whether the U.S. Credit: Richard Stacks/Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Gobitis (1940)įirst-grade students in Baltimore say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag in June 1955. The American people wanted more federal intervention.” 2. “Some of it was about Court personnel changing, some of it was about the Depression, and some of it was about the 1936 election that produced a landslide for FDR,” says Schultz. “The distinction on which decision was rested… a distinction which was novel when made and unsupported by any provision of the Constitution, has long since been abandoned,” wrote Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. Darby (1941), the justices openly questioned the rationale of the 1918 Court. “ was a pretty notorious case out there in terms of precedent,” says Shultz.īut decades later, when the Supreme Court heard a very similar case, United States v. In Hammer, the justices ruled for the business owner, invalidating the federal law and protecting North Carolina’s right to set its own child labor laws. A business owner in North Carolina sued the government because he wanted to employ his 14-year-old son and that prevented him from shipping his products over state lines. Dagenhart in 1918, there was no nationwide ban on child labor, but there was a federal law that prohibited the interstate shipment of goods produced by child labor. Prior to 1938, each state determined its own child labor laws. One of those laws was the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), which outlawed child labor nationwide. ![]() Roosevelt and Congress passed sweeping economic and social reforms. Schultz says that some of the first major reversals on the Supreme Court happened during the New Deal period, when Franklin D. The following are some of the most pivotal and high-profile Supreme Court cases that were later overturned. But that historic deference to precedent has decreased over the past century. “Classically, you didn’t overturn precedent just because you thought that a previous Supreme Court got it wrong,” says Schultz, author of Constitutional Precedent in U.S. Judges tend to defer to precedent because it encourages uniformity, predictability and consistency in the legal system, and historically the Supreme Court only overturned decisions when the original solution proved “unworkable,” or when the conditions on the ground had changed dramatically. “Precedent says that ‘like cases should be decided alike.’ It appeals to our notions of justice and fairness.” That’s because the legal concept of precedent has played such a central role in common law systems for “at least 1,000 years,” says David Schultz, law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. Of the more than 25,500 decisions handed down by the Supreme Court since its creation in 1789, it has only reversed course 146 times, less than one-half of one percent. Supreme Court to overturn one of its own decisions.
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