Determining Notoriety in Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

In a symposium proceeding from the assumption that some of the decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States have been notorious mistakes, one would hope to find some collective understanding about governing principles. If, as I suspect, there will be little agreement about which decisions (and accompanying opinions) qualify as notorious, perhaps there will be greater agreement about evaluative criteria. For example, even if one might not expect to find consensus about whether Roe v. Wade was a notorious mistake, one might at least anticipate a shared sense, among those searching for such mistakes, of how the search might proceed. But what might that shared sense include? And can we fashion any durable criteria for determining notoriety? This essay investigates those questions.