'People have a misunderstanding': Justice John Roberts downplays overturning landmark case

John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court, downplayed the overturning of landmark decisions like the Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling during his tenure.

While speaking Monday at Georgetown University Law Center, Roberts insisted that his court had overturned far fewer precedents than previous courts.

"The Warren Court, I think, overruled an average of 3.2 cases a year," Roberts noted. "The last I looked, the current court's average was 1.8. So the perspective of, you know, how many cases are being overruled and all that, I think people, I think people have a misunderstanding about how much the current court is overruling precedent."

"It is not necessarily a bad thing," he said of the overturned decisions. "Are you happy that Brown overruled, you know, Plessy? You know, of course. So certainly it can be a good thing."

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Roberts suggested that his court had "appropriate standards" in place for overturning earlier decisions.

"If you do it willy-nilly, there's no real sense in which law is established," the justice opined. "And the one case in which you shouldn't is simply because, you know, five members of the court think differently than five members of the court used to. You need a much more substantial justification for unsettling the law, and that's an important consideration to keep in mind."

Roberts said his court considered "how wrong" decisions were before overruling them.

"So you don't want that bad effect to continue on into the future," he insisted. "If it's something that comes up, only every now and then, that's a different consideration."

Watch the video below from C-SPAN.