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68  DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 

Opinion of the Court 

that  the  matter  was  closed.    Id.,  at  867.  That  unprece-
dented claim exceeded the power vested in us by the Con-
stitution.  As Alexander Hamilton famously put it, the Con-
stitution gives the judiciary “neither Force nor Will.”  The 
Federalist No. 78, p. 523 (J. Cooke ed. 1961).  Our sole au-
thority is to exercise “judgment”—which is to say, the au-
thority to judge what the law means and how it should ap-
ply to the case at hand.  Ibid.  The Court has no authority 
to  decree  that  an  erroneous  precedent  is  permanently  ex-
empt from evaluation under traditional stare decisis princi-
ples.  A precedent of this Court is subject to the usual prin-
ciples of stare decisis under which adherence to precedent 
is  the  norm  but  not  an  inexorable  command.  If  the  rule 
were otherwise, erroneous decisions like Plessy and Loch-
ner would still be the law.  That is not how stare decisis op-
erates. 

The Casey plurality also misjudged the practical limits of
this Court’s influence.  Roe certainly did not succeed in end-
ing division on the issue of abortion.  On the contrary, Roe 
“inflamed” a national issue that has remained bitterly divi-
sive for the past half century.  Casey, 505 U. S., at 995 (opin-
ion of Scalia, J.); see also R. Ginsburg, Speaking in a Judi-
cial Voice, 67 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 1185, 1208 (1992) (Roe may 
have “halted a political process,” “prolonged divisiveness,” 
and “deferred stable settlement of the issue”).  And for the 
past 30 years, Casey has done the same. 

Neither  decision  has  ended  debate  over  the  issue  of  a 
constitutional right to obtain an abortion.  Indeed, in this 
case, 26 States expressly ask us to overrule Roe and Casey
and to return the issue of abortion to the people and their
elected  representatives.  This  Court’s  inability  to  end  de-
bate  on  the  issue  should  not  have  been  surprising.    This 
Court  cannot  bring  about  the  permanent  resolution  of  a 
rancorous national controversy simply by dictating a settle-
ment and telling the people to move on.  Whatever influence 
the Court may have on public attitudes must stem from the