points by rqtwteye 9 months ago

Has there been another Supreme Court that has overturned as many precedents than the Roberts court? It looks to me that this court will have a huge impact far into the future.

They are less activist when it comes to ethics rules though. The Clarence Thomas situation is ridiculous.

rufus_foreman 9 months ago

>> Has there been another Supreme Court that has overturned as many precedents than the Roberts court?

Yes, every modern Supreme Court (1950's and on) has overturned not just as many, but more, precedents than the Roberts court.

"The famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969 overruled an average of 3.1 precedents per term. The number ticked up slightly as the court moved to the right under Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who led the court from 1969 to 1986, to 3.4 precedents per term. It dropped under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who led the court from 1986 to 2005, to 2.4 precedents per term.

Through the end of the term that ended in June, the Roberts court has overruled precedents at the lowest rate, at 1.6 per term. But it has picked up the pace since the arrival in 2017 of the first of three justices appointed by President Donald J. Trump. Since then, the rate has been 2.2 precedents per term, still the lowest of the four courts."

-- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden...

What news sources have you been consuming that have been telling you otherwise?

  • unethical_ban 9 months ago

    Perhaps the fact that the courts referenced in that article are 40-60 years in the past, so anyone under age 50 would have the personal experience of seeing the Roberts court as exceptional.

    edit 45 minutes after posting: Also, more opinionated, the Roberts court's reasons for their decisions are often pretty wild and many of their decisions have been a detriment to the country. My pet cases to loathe are Citizens United and Rucho v. Common Cause.

zeroonetwothree 9 months ago

The Roberts court is actually the least "activist" in modern history. His whole philosophy is all about maintaining precedent (obviously sometimes he can't get his way--which seems to be what happened in Dobbs, for instance).

  • kllrnohj 9 months ago

    Bullshit. Overturning decades old decisions is activism, plain and simple. He's taking a steaming dump all over the very idea of precedent and star decisis, it sure as hell isn't his philosophy to maintain it. If it was then Roe v. Wade would never have been overturned.

    • Spivak 9 months ago

      Steelmanning the decision to overturn Roe there's two factors.

      * The belief that Roe was illegitimate from the beginning and that Right to Privacy was invented by the courts out of nothing.

      * Changing prevailing sentiment on the issue in a manner not dissimilar to the position they were in during Civil Rights. Meaning if left to stand the existing rulings would have impeded progress the country clearly wanted to make. This was one of the justifications for Roe in the first place.

      I think it's not hard to see blue states as acting very much like southern states did during the period the tide turned. This of course requires being neutral on abortion but I think it's not inaccurate to say that "an obvious wrong and evil" is how pro-life people view the issue.