<em>Dobbs</em> Is No <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>
Homer Plessy is being recognized more and more. In 1896, the light-skinned, French-speaking Louisianan gen de couleur was memorialized in what is considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow segregation laws. The decision is second in infamy only to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and declared that Black men had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
As one of the worst Supreme Court precedents, Plessy is frequently invoked whenever someone wants to make a case for overturning some other opinion they disagree with. Justifying his decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established a constitutional right to end a pregnancy, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly raised Plessy in his opinion.
“A precedent of this Court is subject to the usual principles of stare decisis under which adherence to precedent is the norm but not an inexorable command,” Alito wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “If the rule were otherwise, erroneous decisions like Plessy and Lochner would still be the law.” When former President Barack Obama criticized the decision on Twitter for having “reversed nearly 50 years of precedent,” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas responded, “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.”
[Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century]
Cornyn was not, as some liberal critics suggested, calling for to be overturned. Like Alito, he was invoking the decision as a correct decision overturning an incorrect precedent, which was . Allowing states to ban abortion, in this analogy, is like declaring Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional. The analogy is a flawed one, however, because the reasoning in echoes the legal logic of far more than that of . Alito has as “the idea that decision legalizing same-sex marriage, Alito “whatever liberty means, though, in 1868 it did not mean the right to enter into a same-sex marriage.” Yet by that reasoning, the decision was not “egregiously wrong.” Alito’s stated legal philosophy would never have found Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional, but that doesn't stop conservatives now from citing to justify overturning .
