Scott Gerber writes: I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said that once a decision becomes "well-settled" respect for the Court requires that people stop challenging it. ************************************************
He said this, of course, in the context of explaining why he would give no one iota of respect to Dred Scott as establishing "the law of the land." He never in fact indicatd any "well-settled" decision of the Court that he thought a) was wrongly decided and b) had to be accepted nonetheless. Would this Lincolnian principle, incidentally, apply, say, to Plessy and the general principle of separate but equal (so that Brown could have been decided on the grounds that the schools weren't in fact equal, empirically, but not on the grounds that racial classifications are, per se, presumptively violative of the 14th amendment). sandy
