Ok, your example is kind of strange though because the courts unilaterally added them first.

Yeah but for a legal reason. Not “eh it felt unjust”. But more materially: yes I bite that bullet that was a bad procedural move that saved millions of women. If the Supreme Court really was taking a stand about turning back the mistakes we made with jurisprudence in the 19th century, I would’ve supported the overturning of roe v wade. Instead (and I hope this is a non controversial, HN-friendly statement) they were very clearly and somewhat openly driven by ideology.

The fact that the courts changed their mind multiple times is a further argument against trusting them.

It is okay to change you mind when given new evidence or the circumstances change.

There wasn't any new evidence, though, and the circumstances hadn't changed, other than the composition of the Supreme Court.

Their argument was not that circumstances had changed, but that the the case was decided wrong to begin with, comparing Roe v. Wade to the case Plessy v. Ferguson, famous for deciding that laws enforcing racial segregation did not violate the U.S. Constitution so long as each race was given equal quality facilities ("separate but equal").

Eh, we got prohibition wrong too. Good learning opportunity.

Apparently not, given that we have had to re-run the “Should we prohibit this thing that was previously considered a personal decision” experiment yet again.

I don't want to take sides here.

That is not an obvious statement. To one side, that is obvious.

To the other, that sounds the same as "murder should be considered a personal decision."

You have already taken a side by comparing Row vs Wade to prohibition. If you don’t want to take a side… don’t present arguments for that side.

I didn't compare Row v Wade to prohibition.

I brought up Roe v Wade as an example of the courts changing their mind, completely unrelated to Row v Wade.

You must have made that association.

I must have misread the “too” in

> Eh, we got prohibition wrong too. Good learning opportunity

as if you were saying we got both of those things wrong.

I mean yeah, as an individual. I’d hope for a little bit more stability and reliability in a legal system.

That's why Supreme Court justices can't be removed - to resist the quick changing whims of the public.

We're almost 250 years old. Hopefully some things have changed in our society and culture to cause a change in the legal system.

The ruling was 50 years old, not 250. Sure, the general process can change. But, it should be hard to remove freedoms that already exist, and the fact that they were able to change a 50 year old ruling on a whim is bad.

Considering the spirit of the law while judging is a different thing from the expansive de-facto law-making that RvW epitomizes.

You cannot expect lawmakers to predict every technological quirk that companies will employ to escape antitrust oversight, so invoking the spirit of the law in those circumstances is just fine. RvW massively expanded the definition of some constitutional rights in ways that have always been contentious. It's a completely different thing.