Supreme Court Overturns: Dobbs, Loper Bright, and Callais

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned its own precedent roughly 232 times since 1810, and the practice of the Supreme Court overturning precedent has reshaped American law on racial segregation, abortion, campaign finance, agency power, and voting rights.¹ The current Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has delivered several of the most consequential reversals in modern history: the elimination of the constitutional right to abortion, the end of Chevron deference to federal agencies, and a sweeping rewrite of Voting Rights Act protections.

When the Court Will Reverse Itself

The doctrine governing when the Court should abandon an earlier ruling is called stare decisis, Latin for “to stand by things decided.” The Court has long said stare decisis is “not an inexorable command.”² In Janus v. AFSCME (2018), which overruled Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Court set out the modern factors it weighs:

Quality of reasoning: whether the original decision was poorly reasoned or rested on standards later shown to be inappropriate.
Workability: whether lower courts can apply the rule consistently.
Changed legal or factual underpinnings: whether later developments have eroded the ruling’s foundations.
Reliance interests: whether people have ordered their affairs around the old rule in ways that make reversal disruptive.

Applying those factors in Janus, the Court found the line Abood drew between chargeable and nonchargeable union expenditures was “impossible to draw with precision” and that First Amendment doctrine had moved well past the 1977 ruling.³

There is a built-in paradox in how the test operates at the top of the system. The framework for overturning precedent is itself precedent, but a new majority is not bound to use the old framework when deciding to replace it. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the majority did not use the Casey-era stare decisis framework to evaluate whether Casey should be overruled, which would have been circular, and instead applied its own conception of the proper standard.⁴ The threshold for overruling can shift with the majority.

Dobbs and the End of Roe

On June 24, 2022, the Court overruled Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion in a 5-1-3 decision.⁵ Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, held that the Constitution makes no reference to abortion and that the right is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The majority called Roe “egregiously wrong” from the start and said Casey‘s “undue burden” test was unworkable.⁶

Chief Justice Roberts concurred in upholding Mississippi’s 15-week ban but argued the Court should have stopped there, discarding the viability line without fully overruling Roe and Casey. Justice Thomas, in a separate concurrence, urged the Court to reconsider all substantive due process precedents, specifically citing cases protecting contraception, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage.⁵ The joint dissent by Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor warned that the decision stripped women of autonomy and that its originalist logic could threaten other established rights.⁷

The immediate consequence was a patchwork. Some states moved to protect abortion access through legislation or state constitutional interpretations; many others enacted bans or activated “trigger laws” designed to take effect once Roe was reversed.⁷

Loper Bright and the End of Chevron

On June 28, 2024, the Court overruled Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), ending the 40-year-old doctrine that required courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. The 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice Roberts, held that the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their own independent judgment on whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.⁸

The majority reasoned that Chevron conflicted with Section 706 of the APA, which directs that the “reviewing court,” not the agency, shall decide “all relevant questions of law.” The opinion rejected the longstanding presumption that statutory ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation of interpretive authority to agencies, calling the Chevron framework unworkable.⁹ Justices Thomas and Gorsuch wrote separate concurrences arguing the doctrine was unconstitutional. Justice Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, dissented.

The ruling shifted the power to resolve statutory ambiguities back to the judiciary. One limit: the Court said prior judicial decisions upholding specific agency actions under Chevron remain subject to ordinary stare decisis and are not automatically invalidated.⁸ The Court did not spell out a replacement framework, leaving uncertainty about how much weight agency expertise should still carry. Scholars have debated whether the practical standard is now Skidmore deference, treating agency views as persuasive but non-binding, or something closer to full de novo review.⁹

Callais and the Voting Rights Act Rewrite

On April 29, 2026, the Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that rewrote the legal framework for challenging racially discriminatory redistricting under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.¹⁰ While the Court affirmed a lower court finding that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, Justice Alito’s opinion imposed new requirements on future VRA plaintiffs that critics said would make successful vote-dilution claims nearly impossible.

The decision “updated” the framework from Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) in three ways. Plaintiffs’ illustrative maps must satisfy all of a state’s legitimate districting objectives, including partisan goals, and cannot use race as a primary criterion. Plaintiffs must provide analysis controlling for party affiliation to show that racial-bloc voting is not simply a product of partisan preference. And historical evidence and disparities attributed to “societal discrimination” receive “much less weight,” with the inquiry refocused on “present-day intentional racial discrimination.”¹¹

Alito stated the Court had “not overruled” the 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan, in which a 5-4 majority had reaffirmed the Gingles framework and struck down an Alabama congressional map for diluting Black voting power.¹² But the new requirements effectively converted the “results” test Congress established in the 1982 VRA amendments into an “intent” inquiry, the opposite of what Congress mandated when it removed the intent requirement.¹³ In Allen, Roberts had specifically noted that Congress “explicitly declined to require proof of discriminatory intent” for Section 2 liability.¹⁴

Justice Kagan’s dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, called the decision the final chapter in a “trilogy that eviscerates the VRA,” following Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. DNC (2021).¹³ Kagan wrote that “only [the people’s representatives in Congress] have the right to say it is no longer needed — not the Members of this Court.”¹⁰ Callais did not use the word “overruled,” but functionally it replaced the controlling test.

Historic Reversals That Changed the Country

Overturning precedent is not a modern invention. Some of the most celebrated moments in Supreme Court history involve the repudiation of earlier rulings.

The most iconic example is Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and its “separate but equal” doctrine that had sanctioned state-imposed racial segregation for nearly 60 years. In Plessy, Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent declared that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens” and predicted the ruling would prove as “pernicious” as the Dred Scott decision.¹⁵ It took more than half a century, but the Court ultimately agreed.

Other landmark reversals include Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which guaranteed the right to counsel for criminal defendants; Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required police to inform suspects of their rights; Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down sodomy laws; Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which removed restrictions on corporate political expenditures by overruling Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce; and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.¹ The Congressional Research Service’s catalog of overruled decisions shows the heaviest concentrations in the 1960s through the 1990s.¹⁶

How Often the Roberts Court Does It

Despite the outsized impact of decisions like Dobbs and Loper Bright, the Roberts Court has not overturned precedent more often than its predecessors in raw terms. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in an October 2025 interview that the Roberts Court overturns precedent roughly once per year, compared with between 2.5 and 3 times per year under the Rehnquist and Burger Courts.² Data analyst Adam Feldman has attributed part of the gap to the fact that the Court hears far fewer cases than it used to: an average of about 66 majority opinions per term under Roberts, compared with roughly 95 under Rehnquist and 132 under Burger.

The criticism is less about frequency than magnitude. The cases the Roberts Court has chosen to overturn, including Roe, Chevron, and Abood, along with the effective neutering of the Gingles framework, represent some of the most consequential legal structures in American governance. Dissenting justices in those cases have argued the majority has been selectively aggressive, applying stare decisis factors loosely when the target is a precedent the conservative majority disfavors.²

Scholars have also noted that the Court sometimes achieves the functional equivalent of overruling through “narrowing,” interpreting a precedent so restrictively that it no longer operates as written. This has been documented in areas including affirmative action, the exclusionary rule, and campaign finance. Critics call it “stealth overruling”; defenders call it a routine judicial technique used by justices across the ideological spectrum.¹⁷

What Happens After a Reversal

The Supreme Court does not always have the last word. Throughout American history, Congress has responded to Court decisions by passing legislation, and in rare cases by amending the Constitution, to restore the rule the Court struck down.

The most dramatic responses came through constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, ratified in 1865 and 1868, overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by abolishing slavery and guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.¹⁸ The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971 in the fastest ratification in history, responded to Oregon v. Mitchell by lowering the voting age to eighteen for all elections after the Court ruled Congress could not do so for state elections by statute alone.¹⁹

More commonly, Congress passes ordinary legislation to override Court interpretations of federal statutes:

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) superseded General Electric Co. v. Gilbert (1976), which had held that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination.²⁰
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) restored the “compelling interest test” after Employment Division v. Smith (1990) abandoned it for neutral laws burdening religious exercise. The Court later limited RFRA’s reach to federal actions in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997).¹⁸
The ADA Amendments Act (2008) reinstated a broad definition of “disability” after the Court had narrowed it in Sutton v. United Air Lines (1999) and Toyota Motor Manufacturing v. Williams (2002).²⁰
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009) responded to Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007) by resetting the statute of limitations for pay discrimination claims with each paycheck.¹⁸

After Loper Bright, Senator Elizabeth Warren led the introduction of the Stop Corporate Capture Act in July 2024, which would codify the Chevron doctrine into statute and restore agency deference.²¹ The bill has not been enacted.

Legislative overrides take hold slowly in practice. On average, more than four years pass before an overridden precedent is properly flagged in legal research databases, and only about 20 percent of overridden Supreme Court decisions are ever red-flagged on services like Westlaw. Lower courts frequently continue citing the old precedent as controlling authority, sometimes for years after Congress has replaced it.²⁰

Pending Cases That Could Add to the List

Several major cases from the October 2025 term remain undecided and could produce further significant precedent changes. In Trump v. Slaughter (No. 25-332), the Court is weighing whether the statutory removal protections for Federal Trade Commission commissioners violate the separation of powers, and whether Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the foundational precedent shielding independent agency heads from at-will presidential removal, should be overruled.²² The case arose from President Trump’s removal of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without alleging the statutory grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”²³ A ruling for the president would reshape the structure of independent agencies across the federal government.

Trump v. Barbara (No. 25-365) challenges an executive order that would reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders. The Court heard oral arguments on April 1, 2026, and a decision is expected by early July.²⁴ In Watson v. Republican National Committee (No. 24-1260), argued in March 2026, the Court is considering whether federal statutes preempt state laws allowing mail-in ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day, a ruling that could affect procedures in dozens of states ahead of the November 2026 elections.²⁵ In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (No. 24-43), the Court is expected to decide by late June 2026 whether state bans on transgender student-athletes violate the Equal Protection Clause.²⁶

Each of these cases carries the possibility that a long-standing rule, or a recent one, will not survive the term in its current form. That is how the Supreme Court overturning precedent has always worked: slowly for decades, then suddenly in a single opinion.

1
National Constitution Center. A Short List of Overturned Supreme Court Landmark Decisions
2
SCOTUSblog. Overturning Precedent on the Roberts Court
3
Supreme Court of the United States. Janus v. AFSCME, 585 U.S. ___
4
Harvard Law Review. Precedent About Precedent
5
National Constitution Center. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
6
Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392
7
Brennan Center for Justice. Roe v. Wade and Supreme Court Abortion Cases
8
Supreme Court of the United States. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451
9
Yale Journal on Regulation. What Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo Means for the Future of Chevron Deference
10
Campaign Legal Center. US Supreme Court Has Eviscerated Voting Rights Act — What’s Next
11
Supreme Court of the United States. Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24-109
12
CNN. Supreme Court Overturning Precedent Voting Rights Act
13
SCOTUSblog. The Supreme Court’s Indefensible Evisceration of the Voting Rights Act
14
SCOTUSblog. Supreme Court Upholds Section 2 of Voting Rights Act
15
National Constitution Center. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537
16
Congress.gov. Decisions Overruled by Subsequent Decisions
17
Columbia Law Review. Narrowing Precedent in the Supreme Court
18
SCOTUSblog. When Congress Overrides the Court
19
Reagan Library. Constitutional Amendments – Amendment 26
20
Judicature (Duke). How Courts Do and Don’t Respond to Statutory Overrides
21
Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren Leads Senate Response to End of Chevron Doctrine
22
SCOTUSblog. Trump v. Slaughter
23
Congress.gov. Removal of Independent Agency Heads
24
SCOTUSblog. Trump v. Barbara
25
SCOTUSblog. Watson v. Republican National Committee
26
National Constitution Center. Unpacking the Transgender Athletes Case at the Supreme Court