One of those laws was the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), which outlawed child labor nationwide. Roosevelt and Congress passed sweeping economic and social reforms. Schultz says that some of the first major reversals on the Supreme Court happened during the New Deal period, when Franklin D. The following are some of the most pivotal and high-profile Supreme Court cases that were later overturned. But that historic deference to precedent has decreased over the past century. “Classically, you didn’t overturn precedent just because you thought that a previous Supreme Court got it wrong,” says Schultz, author of Constitutional Precedent in U.S.

Judges tend to defer to precedent because it encourages uniformity, predictability and consistency in the legal system, and historically the Supreme Court only overturned decisions when the original solution proved “unworkable,” or when the conditions on the ground had changed dramatically. “Precedent says that ‘like cases should be decided alike.’ It appeals to our notions of justice and fairness.” That’s because the legal concept of precedent has played such a central role in common law systems for “at least 1,000 years,” says David Schultz, law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. Of the more than 25,500 decisions handed down by the Supreme Court since its creation in 1789, it has only reversed course 146 times, less than one-half of one percent. Supreme Court to overturn one of its own decisions.

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