Plessy was chosen as a plaintiff in part because of his racial ambiguity.

It means what people would have understood it to mean at the time it was written.” Specifically citing the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage, Alito complained that “whatever liberty means, though, in 1868 it did not mean the right to enter into a same-sex marriage.” Yet by that reasoning, the Plessy 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 Plessy to justify overturning Roe. Alito has described his own legal philosophy, originalism, as “the idea that the Constitution has a fixed meaning it doesn’t change. The analogy is a flawed one, however, because the reasoning in Dobbs echoes the legal logic of Plessy far more than that of Brown. Allowing states to ban abortion, in this analogy, is like declaring Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional. Like Alito, he was invoking the Brown decision as a correct decision overturning an incorrect precedent, which was Plessy. “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.”Īdam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th centuryĬornyn was not, as some liberal critics suggested, calling for Brown to be overturned. “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. Wade, the 1973 case that established a constitutional right to end a pregnancy, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly raised Plessy in his opinion. Justifying his decision to overturn Roe v. 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.Īs 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. Ferguson, which upheld Jim Crow segregation laws. 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. Homer Plessy is being recognized more and more.

Top 10 worst supreme court decisions