This paper examines four landmark Supreme Court cases — Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Bush v. Gore — through the lens of stare decisis and evolving social policy. Drawing on legal scholarship and commentary, the paper argues that each case both reflected and shaped broader social attitudes, particularly regarding civil rights and individual freedoms. It considers how the Court's willingness or reluctance to depart from precedent aligned with — or diverged from — changing national values, and contrasts the more progressive rulings in Brown and Roe with the arguably reactionary outcomes in Plessy and Bush v. Gore.
The paper demonstrates effective use of a comparative legal analysis framework. Rather than summarizing each case independently, the author draws explicit connections across cases — for example, contrasting Bush v. Gore with Brown v. Board of Education to argue that the former more closely resembles Plessy v. Ferguson in its treatment of minority rights. This technique shows how analytical structure can strengthen an argument without requiring new evidence.
The paper opens with a specific claim about Roe v. Wade's social effects before broadening to a four-case analysis. It then focuses on the Plessy–Brown pair as a model for how precedent interacts with social change, extends this framework to Roe v. Wade, and applies it critically to Bush v. Gore. The conclusion synthesizes the four cases into two contrasting camps — reactionary and progressive — delivering a clear, evaluative ending.
The authors of Freakonomics claimed in an interview on the Today Show that the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which paved the way for legal abortions, also helped the crime rate to drop. That was not the first time that point had been made. Author Steven Levitt had been quoted in an article in the American Prospect in 2001, when he released his contention that there was a stronger link than that between tougher policing and reduced crime rates. That more direct link was between abortion and crime. As the article stated, "Or to be more precise, between the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and the much heralded fall in crime rates starting about 18 years later, in the early 1990s" (Abramsky, 2001, p. 25). Clearly, if that is true, Roe v. Wade had a major effect on changing social policy; indeed, it was also likely a reaction to changing social policy.
All four of the cases considered here contributed to and were at least partially representative of changing social policy. They also shed some light on the principle of stare decisis, and the implied as well as actual powers of the judiciary.
An interesting pair of cases in particular helps trace both social attitudes — in this case toward slavery and discrimination — and the use of the stare decisis principle. Those two cases are Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education (Topeka, KS), although all the cases raise questions concerning precedent and why it was, or was not, the deciding factor for the members of the Supreme Court.
One observer, Paulsen, believes that the Supreme Court often uses "changes in factual circumstances or assumptions that could justify departure from precedent" (2000, p. 1529), a viewpoint also articulated in a National Review article (1986, p. 17+). Paulsen notes that it was very likely changed circumstances in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that justified its de facto overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (Paulsen, 2000).
Plessy v. Ferguson, while not based on school issues but rather on commercial interests and individual minority rights, nevertheless would have been sufficient to continue in force the practice of "separate but equal" schools for minority students. In addition to the precedent in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which discrimination was essentially upheld, there was a widely held belief at the time that Black Americans were mentally inferior — despite clear evidence to the contrary. As one scholar noted, figures such as Frederick Douglass, a self-educated former slave who became a U.S. ambassador, and George Washington Carver, a former slave who became a great agricultural innovator, demonstrated that many Black Americans "were far more intelligent than most whites. There was no rational educational ground to support tracking by race and no defensible state interest" (Kapla, 1999, p. 310).
On the basis of social concepts at the time, the Supreme Court could easily have acted on the basis of stare decisis. However, it is tempting to think that the justices, if not society as a whole, were well aware of how untenable the belief in Black inferiority was, and therefore took the needed changes in society as their starting point for dismissing precedent in Brown v. Board of Education — and found in such a way that society was, in fact, changed by the decision. It is also tempting to think that the Brown v. Board of Education decision opened the way for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society a decade later. The legislation engendered by that social vision included the civil rights legislation that today prohibits job and housing discrimination, along with many more advances that were not even under general discussion when Brown v. Board of Education was decided.
In this foursome of cases, two are reactionary, attempting to hold onto some imaginary era in which it was possible for some people to dictate what was allowable for other people. Plessy v. Ferguson did so on a relatively narrow level; Bush v. Gore took equal protection back several steps. Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, on the other hand, may have been just slightly ahead of their time — infinitely more daring in their willingness to depart from stare decisis, and effective avenues for changing society in the process.
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