Actions for Overturned : the rhetoric of overruling in the United States Supreme Court
Overturned : the rhetoric of overruling in the United States Supreme Court / Clarke Rountree
- Author
- Rountree, Clarke, 1958-
- Published
- Tuscaloosa, Alabama : The University of Alabama Press, [2025]
- Physical Description
- xii, 352 pages ; 24 cm.
- Series
- Contents
- Judicial rhetoric and overruling in the US Supreme Court -- Stare Decisis and overruling in the US Supreme Court -- Overruling in the nineteenth century : maritime and money -- Overruling staturoty interpretations : jurisdiction, patents, and civil rights -- Justifying the "switch in time that saved nine" : the Supreme Court's about-face foloowing FDR's court-packing threat -- Expanding civil rights and challenging states' authority : Fourteenth Amendment overruling cases -- Dobbs v. Jackson and the decline of stare decisis in the Roberts Court.
- Summary
- "An audacious US Supreme Court is overturning a number of long-standing precedents, and Overturned offers a lively account of the court's history of overturning prior cases and examples and analyses of 300 cases overruled in its history. The immense controversy surrounding the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, which overruled Roe v. Wade and erased the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, has focused public attention on how and why the Supreme Court knocks down long-established precedents. In his vivid and accessible style, scholar Clarke Rountree recounts the rhetorical pirouettes and linguistic acrobatics the court has deployed to explain its reversal of Dobbs and numerous other landmark decisions. He reviews strategies the court uses to undermine a previous court's standing without undermining its own. He analyzes overrulings across time, by type (constitutional cases versus statutory and common law cases), by the ages of the overturned precedents, with changes in the court's membership, and through other variables. Rountree gives engrossing accounts of pivotal overrulings in the past, such as when Lincoln's Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase used the Legal Tender Act in 1862 to raise money for the Civil War then ruled the same law unconstitutional in 1870 when he served as chief justice. Rountree retells Thomas Edison's attempt to monopolize the burgeoning film industry, which was stopped only when the Supreme Court overturned an earlier patent-rights case in 1917. Finally, Rountree applies his myriad insights to the politically fraught Dobbs case. Overturned makes a valuable contribution to law, rhetoric, politics, and history, and readers interested in the role and function of America's highest court will find Rountree's account fast-paced, lively, and engaging"--
- Subject(s)
- ISBN
- 9780817322182 hardcover
0817322183 hardcover
9780817361808 paperback
0817361804 paperback
9780817395384 electronic book - Bibliography Note
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 46196134