Reversals of Court Decisions By Amendment

Reversals of Court Decisions By Amendment Supreme Court decisions that interpret provisions of the Constitution can be overturned directly only by amendment. Article V of the Constitution provides that amendments can be proposed by two‐thirds majorities of both houses of Congress or by a convention that Congress calls at the request of two‐thirds of the state legislatures; amendments must be ratified by three‐quarters of the states, either by their legislatures or by special conventions. All successful amendments thus far have been proposed by Congress, and all but one (the Twenty‐first, ending Prohibition) have been ratified by state legislature.

Of the twenty‐six amendments to the Constitution, as many as seven can be interpreted as overturning Supreme Court decisions. The first such amendment was the Eleventh, adopted in 1795, which overturned Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) by restating the immunity of states from lawsuits in federal court. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which prohibited slavery, and the Fourteenth (1868), which ensured that blacks had the right of citizenship, in effect overturned the Court's most infamous decision, Scott v. Sandford (1857). The Sixteenth Amendment (1913) gave Congress the power to levy an income tax and therefore negated Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. (1895). In the most recent instance, the Twenty‐sixth Amendment, adopted in 1971, overturned the portion of Oregon v. Mitchell (1970) that held that Congress could not require the states to set the voting age at eighteen in elections to state offices: the amendment itself lowered the voting age to eighteen. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which prohibited the denial of the vote to women, and the Twenty‐fourth Amendment (1964), which prohibited the imposition of a poll tax as a requirement to vote in federal elections, superseded decisions that had upheld these practices under the Constitution. A great many efforts to overturn other decisions through amendments have failed.

Although no amendments have yet been proposed by convention, in a few instances several state legislatures have petitioned for such a convention to overcome a Supreme Court decision. After the Court's decisions of the 1960s requiring that state legislative districts be reapportioned on a “one person, one vote” basis, the number of petitions for a convention to consider overturning those rulings fell only one short of the thirty‐four that were required.

See also Constitutional Amending Process; Constitutional Amendments.

Lawrence Baum