When the Supreme court is wrong | Mark Rienzi | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 mark you just discussed gobitis and barnett a case where the Supreme Court said one thing and then and in that instance within three years fully reversed itself or really significantly reversed itself can you give us other examples of that happening here is it pertains to religious freedom and so on sure so well here’s the the best example which isn’t a religious freedom case but

0:21 it’s one that I think a lot of people have heard of which is brown v board of education saying that the schools would be desegregated in the 1890s the Supreme Court decided a case called Plessy when it said even though the Constitution guarantees you the equal protection of the laws we’re going to say that we know better than the text and we know better than the people who wrote it and we think people would really be more

0:41 comfortable if we separated people out by race on a train car right separate but equal is okay that was Plessy versus Ferguson it took us 60 years to get that overturned in Brown versus Board of Education when the court said the government’s have to desegregate the schools but what was important is that the court eventually said well my obligation is a Supreme Court justice is

1:02 not simply to the last decision that person who had this job before me made my obligation is to uphold the Constitution because that’s what we the people agreed to and if the court has gotten it wrong of course they need to go back and fix it and get the right answer