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Page Number: 78

70  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

stare decisis—and with good reason.  Does the dissent really
maintain that overruling Plessy was not justified until the 
country had experienced more than a half-century of state-
sanctioned  segregation  and  generations  of  Black  school
children had suffered all its effects?  Post, at 44–45. 

Here is another example.  On the dissent’s view, it must 
have been wrong for West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 
319 U. S. 624, to overrule Minersville School Dist. v. Gobi-
tis,  310  U. S.  586,  a  bare  three  years  after  it  was  handed 
down.  In  both  cases,  children  who  were  Jehovah’s  Wit-
nesses refused on religious grounds to salute the flag or re-
cite  the  pledge  of  allegiance.    The  Barnette  Court  did  not 
claim that its reexamination of the issue was prompted by 
any  intervening  legal  or  factual  developments,  so  if  the 
Court had followed the dissent’s new version of stare deci-
sis, it would have been compelled to adhere to Gobitis and 
countenance  continued  First  Amendment  violations  for 
some unspecified period.

Precedents should be respected, but sometimes the Court
errs, and occasionally the Court issues an important deci-
sion that is egregiously wrong.  When that happens, stare 
decisis is not a straitjacket.  And indeed, the dissent even-
tually  admits  that  a  decision  could  “be  overruled  just  be-
cause it is terribly wrong,” though the dissent does not ex-
plain when that would be so.  Post, at 45. 

2 
Even if the dissent were correct in arguing that an egre-
giously wrong decision should (almost) never be overruled 
unless  its  mistake  is  later  highlighted  by  “major  legal  or 
factual changes,” reexamination of Roe and Casey would be 
amply justified.  We have already mentioned a number of 
post-Casey  developments, see supra, at 33–34, 59–63, but 
the most profound change may be the failure of the Casey 
plurality’s call for “the contending sides” in the controversy
about abortion “to end their national division,” 505 U. S., at