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44  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

of D. C., 261 U. S. 525 (1923), and a whole line of cases be-
ginning with Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905).  Ad-
kins had found a state minimum-wage law unconstitutional 
because, in the Court’s view, the law interfered with a con-
stitutional  right  to  contract.    261  U. S.,  at  554–555.    But 
then  the  Great  Depression  hit,  bringing  with  it  unparal-
leled  economic  despair.    The  experience  undermined—in
fact, it disproved—Adkins’s assumption that  a wholly un-
regulated market could meet basic human needs.  As Jus-
tice Jackson (before becoming a Justice) wrote of that time: 
“The older world of laissez faire was recognized everywhere
outside the Court to be dead.”  The Struggle for Judicial Su-
premacy 85 (1941).  In West Coast Hotel, the Court caught 
up, recognizing through the lens of experience the flaws of 
existing legal doctrine.  See also ante, at 11 (ROBERTS, C. J., 
concurring  in  judgment).    The  havoc  the  Depression  had 
worked on ordinary Americans, the Court noted, was “com-
mon  knowledge  through  the  length  and  breadth  of  the
land.”  300 U. S., at 399.  The laissez-faire approach had led 
to “the exploiting of workers at wages so low as to be insuf-
ficient to meet the bare cost of living.”  Ibid.  And since Ad-
kins was decided, the law had also changed.  In several de-
cisions,  the  Court  had  started  to  recognize  the  power  of
States to implement economic policies designed to enhance
their citizens’ economic well-being.  See, e.g., Nebbia v. New 
York,  291  U. S.  502  (1934);  O’Gorman  &  Young,  Inc.  v. 
Hartford  Fire  Ins.  Co.,  282  U. S.  251  (1931).    The  state-
ments in those decisions, West Coast Hotel explained, were
“impossible  to  reconcile”  with  Adkins.  300  U. S.,  at  398. 
There was no escaping the need for Adkins to go. 

Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Fergu-
son, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), along with its doctrine of “sepa-
rate but equal.”  By 1954, decades of Jim Crow had made 
clear what Plessy’s turn of phrase actually meant: “inher-
ent[ ] [in]equal[ity].”  Brown, 347 U. S., at 495.  Segregation