The most important decisions the Supreme Court has overturned

Alito Jr. noted in the draft opinion he authored, precedent is not sacrosanct, and some of the most important and celebrated decisions in Supreme Court history cast precedent aside.“Without these decisions,” he wrote, “American constitutional law as we know it would be unrecognizable, and this would be a different country.”David Schultz, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and political science professor at Hamline University, said that between 1789 and 2020, the court reversed its own constitutional precedents 145 times — barely one-half of 1 percent of all rulings.But Schultz, author of the new book “Constitutional Precedent in US Supreme Court Reasoning,” said it’s become more common, albeit still rare, in recent decades. v. Gobitis, the court ruled 8-1 that a school district could compel public students to salute the U.S. flag, turning away a challenge from the father of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were expelled from the public schools of Minersville, Pa., for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag on religious grounds.“The flag is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution,” wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter in the majority opinion, adding that “the courtroom is not the arena for debating issues of educational policy.”The Supreme Court clerk who leaked a ruling to Wall Street tradersBut in a striking reversal in 1943, the court sided with Jehovah’s Witnesses who challenged a flag-saluting requirement in West Virginia. v. Barnette that compelling public school students to salute the flag violated the First Amendment.Alito seized on that reversal in his draft opinion overturning Roe.“Barnette stands out because nothing had changed during the intervening period other than the Court’s be­lated recognition that its earlier decision had been seriously wrong,” he wrote.Actually, something else had also changed: There were two new justices, and they both voted to overturn the decision. Jackson, “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.”Two of the justices who changed their minds, Hugo Black and William Douglas, wrote a concurring opinion explaining their change of heart.“Reluctance to make the Federal Constitution a rigid bar against state regulation of conduct thought [to be] inimical to the public welfare was the controlling influence which moved us to consent to the Gobitis decision,” the duo wrote.