As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Part III A

Paragraph 2 of 5

Sentence 3 of 3

This sentence looks like it has three claims:

“It was ‘egregiously wrong’ on the day it was decided, see Ramos, 590 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Kavanaugh, J.) (slip op., at 7), and as the Solicitor General agreed at oral argument, it should have been overruled at the earliest opportunity, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 92–93.”

The claims adjusted for clarity:

• “[Plessy v. Ferguson] was ‘egregiously wrong’ on the day it was decided.”
• “[A]s the Solicitor General agreed at oral argument, [Plessy v. Ferguson] should have been overruled at the earliest opportunity.”

For that matter, this is implied, too:

• “[T]he Solicitor General agreed at oral argument [that Plessy v. Ferguson] should have been overruled at the earliest opportunity.”

The first claim is widely acknowledged as true, so I’m going to call it true. If people want to argue the point, I’m open to hearing them out. For what it’s worth, here’s the passage in Ramos that also asserts the truth of this claim:

“A case may be egregiously wrong when decided, see, e.g., Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), or may be unmasked as egregiously wrong based on later legal or factual understandings or developments, see, e.g., Nevada v. Hall, 440 U. S. 410 (1979), or both, ibid.”

The second and third claims are tied closely. At first I thought this was still referring to Ramos, but the transcript for that oral argument only runs 69 pages. The reference is actually to the Dobbs oral argument, and here is the exchange from pages 92 and 93 from that transcript:

JUSTICE ALITO: Is it your argument that a case can never be overruled simply because it was egregiously wrong?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: I think that at the very least, the state would have to come forward with some kind of materiall changed circumstance or some kind of materially new argument, and Mississippi hasn’t done so in this case. It is –

JUSTICE ALITO: Really? So suppose Plessy versus Ferguson was re-argued in 1897, so nothing had changed. Would it not be sufficient to say that was an egregiously wrong decision on the day that it was handed down and now it should be overruled?

GENERAL PRELOGAR: It certainly was egregiously wrong on the day that it was handed down, Plessy, but what the Court said in analyzing Plessy to Brown and Casey was that what had become clear is that the factual premise that underlay the decision, this idea that segregation didn’t create a badge of inferiority, had been entirely mistaken.

So the third claim is definitely true, and since the difference between the second and third claims is the reiteration of the first claim, which I’ve already determined to be true, I’ll call these two true, too.

I see three true claims here:

• “[Plessy v. Ferguson] was ‘egregiously wrong’ on the day it was decided.”
• “[A]s the Solicitor General agreed at oral argument, [Plessy v. Ferguson] should have been overruled at the earliest opportunity.”
• “[T]he Solicitor General agreed at oral argument [that Plessy v. Ferguson] should have been overruled at the earliest opportunity.”