Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 184.0

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

37 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

fere  with  the  mailing  of  drugs  used  for  medication  abor-
tions?  The Constitution protects travel and speech and in-
terstate commerce, so today’s ruling will give rise to a host 
of  new  constitutional  questions.    Far  from  removing  the 
Court from the abortion issue, the majority puts the Court
at  the  center  of  the  coming  “interjurisdictional  abortion 
wars.”  Id., at ___ (draft, at 1). 

In short, the majority does not save judges from unwieldy
tests or extricate them from the sphere of controversy.  To 
the contrary, it discards a known, workable, and predicta-
ble standard in favor of something novel and probably far 
more complicated.  It forces the Court to wade further into 
hotly  contested  issues,  including  moral  and  philosophical 
ones, that the majority criticizes Roe and Casey for address-
ing. 

B 
When overruling constitutional precedent, the Court has
almost always pointed to major legal or factual changes un-
dermining a decision’s original basis.  A review of the Ap-
pendix to this dissent proves the point.  See infra, at 61–66. 
Most “successful proponent[s] of overruling precedent,” this
Court once said, have carried “the heavy burden of persuad-
ing the Court that changes in society or in the law dictate
that  the  values  served  by  stare  decisis  yield  in  favor  of  a 
greater objective.”  Vasquez, 474 U. S., at 266.  Certainly,
that was so of the main examples the majority cites: Brown 
v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), and West Coast 
Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U. S. 379 (1937).  But it is not so 
today.  Although nodding to some arguments others have 
made about “modern developments,” the majority does not 
really rely on them, no doubt seeing their slimness.  Ante, 
at 33; see ante, at 34.  The majority briefly invokes the cur-
rent controversy over abortion.  See ante, at 70–71.  But it 
has to acknowledge that the same dispute has existed for