I think I’m getting the point you’re making. Obviously there were two different cases (although I would dispute that it was a different controversy). But isn’t the point of precedent that you establish a legal principle and apply it to different cases? The Plessy decision didn’t just apply to Homer Plessy and the Brown decision didn’t just apply to Oliver Brown.
The Plessy decision figuratively said “From now on, the principle we’re setting here applies to all future segregation cases.” The Brown decision said “From now on, the Plessy principle no longer applies to future segregation cases.” It seems like a pretty subtle nuance to say then that Brown didn’t overturn Plessy.
Who said Brown v. Board of Education didn’t “overturn” Plessy v. Ferguson?
The trouble is you’re using non-legal jargon to try to describe legal actions.
The decision in Plessy was final as to Plessy. The ruling was never “overturned” by subsequent action in that case. Thus, the judgment entered after the Supreme Court issued its decision is still final.
The OP was talking about situations where the judgment/order of the “Supreme Court” is appealed. In the US, the legal order resulting from the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States is not appealable. The effect of that appeal under the concept of stare decisis may at some point be terminated by subsequent court action, as happened in the case of Plessy at the time of Brown.
And it WAS a different “controversy.” A controversy in judicial parlance isn’t some broad social issue that needs to be resolved. It’s a specific dispute between a specific set of parties. The controversy in Plessy was not “Is it ok to provide separate but equal facilities to blacks?”, but rather “Is it ok to try Homer Plessy for the alleged crime of having seated himself in a “whites only” railroad car?” This is clearly a different “controversy” from that which the Court had before it in Brown.
When I said Brown succeeded in overturning Plessy and Bricker said no, that seemed to be what he was saying. If that’s not what he was saying then he could have offered an explanation of what it was that he was saying.
I understand that a decision is issued in response to one case (technically five cases that were combined into one in Brown). But once the decision in that one case was issued, it applied to all cases. It’s not like the Supreme Court prohibited segregation in five specific communities while leaving it intact in every other community in America. Do you think a segregated school in Mississippi, for example, would have been able to claim in 1955 that the Brown decision only applied to a different case and controversy?
But if the decision made in the Brown case applied to the Plessy case as well, then the Brown decision affected the Plessy case and therefore overturned the Plessy decision.
Oh, I get it, you are failing to understand stare decisis. Got it.
The decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) actually was not a final decision. Having determined that “separate but equal” school facilities would no longer be allowed under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
the Court had to decide what to do about the situation of the individual plaintiffs who’s cases had been consolidated for the hearing. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) [Brown II], the Court reversed the judgments that had been appealed in the various District Courts, and remanded the cases for the District Courts to enter necessary orders to desegregate the defendant school districts “with all deliberate speed” (except for the Delaware case, which had been decided by the Delaware Supreme Court in favor of the plaintiffs; this was, of course, affirmed, and the matter remanded to that court for the same purpose). The result was chaos and confusion, as you might imagine.
Now, it’s important to understand that a decision in a specific case is only binding on the parties of that case. This is a principle of the law called res judicata (“the thing decided”). We don’t allow parties who lose multiple chances to re-litigate issues already decided. Sometimes, one of the parties will want to re-litigate the issue under slightly different circumstances, and in those cases, they may be barred from doing so by what we call “collateral estoppel”. But if Able sues Baker, and as a result of the suit it is determined that Baker wronged Able in some fashion, and Baker thus owes Able money, Charlie doesn’t get to tell Delta that Delta has to give him the same thing, just because the facts are similar. Delta and Charlie are not bound by the case of Able v. Baker.
But suppose Able v. Baker went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and as a result, the Supreme Court held that people cannot tell lies about someone else and avoid slander laws simply by having an unreasonable belief they were telling the truth. Now, when Charlie sues Delta for doing the same thing, Charlie’s attorney will tell the judge hearing the matter that the Supreme Court has already issued a decision on a case like this, Able v. Baker, and because of this the judge must find in favor of Charlie. Because of the principle of stare decisis, the judge in the Charlie v. Delta case (assuming that he finds that the facts are substantially similar) will rule in favor of Charlie, even if he/she might not have wanted to do so absent the decision of the SCotUS in Able v. Baker. Stare decisis (“to stand by that which is decided”) is a principle of common law that says that, once a higher authority has made a determination on a point of law, subordinate courts will abide by that determination.
Suppose the judge in Charlie v. Delta doesn’t abide by it. Suppose he rules in favor of Delta anyway, and says, in essence, “screw the SCotUS!” Charlie’s attorney immediately asks the appellate court with jurisdiction over the judge to issue a stay of the decision, and appeals the decision. This is probably granted, because, you know, stare decisis. The judgment of the judge will be vacated, the matter remanded to him with a stern injunction from the appellate court to do as he is supposed to under the law of the land.
So the decision in Brown v. Board of Education didn’t apply to any school districts directly except those who had been subject to the appeals consolidated before the Court. But the holding of the Court regarding Plessy made it clear to all that any further attempt to keep a segregated system of schools would result in the Supreme Court reaching exactly the same result. By operation of stare decisis, that meant that lower courts from that point forward were to consider Plessy no longer valid authority for deciding equal protection cases.
Note that the result of Brown II was a messy story of schools, governments and the courts trying to figure out ways to wiggle out of the situation. It took a THIRD decision from the Supreme Court (Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218 (1964) to put an end to the shenanigans. In that case, the Supreme Court specifically held that “…the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out”.
Now, I know that you do know the effect of this. But it goes to what I said in my last post. You are using a term (“overturned”) which lacks precise legal meaning. Bricker was merely pointing out that the thread dealt with the specific situation of appealing a “Supreme Court’s” decision, and the effect of that upon the case/controversy itself. You were talking about the wider effect under stare decisis, which, as we see, is not the result of the judgment in a specific case, or even of the decision of the appellate court, but rather the result of the respect the judicial system pays to that decision.
NO it did NOT. Assuming that Homer Plessy was still alive, and assuming that Homer Plessy would have been entitled to damages, Homer Plessy would NOT be able to cite Brown v. Board of Education to force the courts to let him re-litigate his appeal. That case was done. Not able to be undone by some later decision undoing the effect of the holding in his case.
Actually, some of the other southern states did try that argument post-Brown. They tried arguing that the facts were different in their case, or that the state law was different from the Kansas law, or, um, reasons.
They were ultimately unsuccessful in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but each of those cases had to be carefully reviewed by the District and Fifth Circuit courts. See the “Fifth Circuit Four”: United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit - Wikipedia
There is a difference between changing the formulation for evaluating future claims and changing the result of a particular case.
Plessy’s case was over. Even if he were still alive when Brown was handed down, he couldn’t head over to the railroad and say, “See? Now you owe me a refund for kicking me out of my first class railroad seat!”
But Plessy could buy another first class ticket, and if he got kicked off again, sue in a new case, confident that Plessy II would be decided differently.
Sure. One could argue that the Dred Scott decision was appealed, and overturned, by Lee v. Grant. Final decision appropriately delivered at Appomattox Courthouse.
My apologies for not being clear but I’m trying to draw the distinction between the Plessy case and the Plessy decision.
The Supreme Court issued the Brown decision in 1954 and from that point on the Plessy decision was no longer applicable. So in that sense the Plessy decision was overturned by the Brown decision; the Brown decision replaced the Plessy decision as the guiding legal principle on segregation cases.
But, as has been pointed out, this did not directly affect the Plessy case because that had been decided back in 1896 and it was not an active case anymore.
The Plessy case existed as a singular event in 1896. The Plessy decision which resulted from that case existed as an ongoing legal precedent from 1896 to 1954.
Bingo. A case creates two things: a result, which binds the parties, and a precedent, in which the reasoning used to reach the result becomes binding on future similar cases.
Yes. Precisely. But the whole point of what Bricker and I have been saying is that, while Plessy stopped being good law, it was not the case that the Plessydecision was negated. That’s still on the books. It just isn’t valid legal precedent any more. However, this thread was talking about actually reversing the decision of a “supreme court”. Hence the objections.
You know for the first time I decided to actually read [*Plessy/I]. I must admit, that reading the text of it, I am surprised to read that the finding was a rather narrow one, much narrower than I had been led to believe.
The questions were,
Does the 14th Amendment permit reasonable regulations which treat classes differently. The answer was, yes.
If so, was the case in hand a reasonable regulation? Answer; yes.
So, would I be accurate in saying only the second part has been overruled?
Interestingly, in an earlier case the Court has found a regulation which was facially equal, but practically to be discriminatory to Chinese to be unconstitutional.Yick Wo v Hopkins 118 U.S. 356 (1886)
ISTR hearing an item on NPR several years ago, in which a petitioner requested the Court to overturn a decision of an earlier Court (possibly with some of the same justices, but I’m not sure) under some principle for which a Latin name was given that roughly translated to we erred [in our prior finding]. Nina Totenberg (IIRC) mentioned that such petitions were rarely successful.
In my memory, the petitioner was the widow of a flight crew member who died in a military aircraft crash during what I want to say was a training mission of some sort. She had been unable to get details about the accident because the military was citing some national security reason for keeping the results of the crash investigation secret. I don’t recall if it was her case that originally went against her in SCOTUS (although I kind of think it was, and she was asking the court to reconsider after the passage of many years).
IIRC (again), she was once again disappointed by the outcome.
The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed (or overruled) itself a number of times, but it’s very uncommon for this to happen quickly, say within three years. So while technically there is no appeal from a U.S Supreme Court decision, if the Court accepts a nearly identical case from the same ultimate plaintiffs within a short period and decides differently, that may functionally be an appeal. Quick reversals are rare.
Nitpick: the Plessy opinion merely held that segregation in public railcars was permissible. It had no direct impact on segregation in public education. However, SCOTUS later extended its Plessy reasoning in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education and Lum v. Rice. Segregated school systems considerably predated Plessy.
Saying Brown overturned Plessy is common shorthand - even among attorneys. And Burger did of course reference Plessy in his opinion in Brown I. However, as AK84 notes, the Brown I holding was very narrow. Plessy established that some forms of segregation were permissible, and Brown established that one form - of a different type to the one at issue in Plessy - was not.
Plessy was never expressly reversed; right now, there is no SCOTUS decision which says railroads can’t segregate their passengers.
