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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

I don't know enough about Dred Scott. What is the parallel between that case and abortion?

Dred Scott v. Sandford was a landmark supreme court case that, among other things, denied people of African descent US citizenship. The Chief Justice Taney believed it would finally end the debate around slavery in the US, instead it inflamed controversy that eventually led to civil war.

Perhaps the grandparent was suggesting that was a likely outcome here as well?

The parallel is that they were both Supreme Court cases that had their rulings overturned years later, and in both, a lot of people liked the original decision and were upset that it no longer stood.

“Both Hitler and Obama were disliked by millions of people”

Same energy. This ruling today has more in common with Dred Scott (reduces citizens back down to property because of founder intent or something) than the overturning of it.

It’s a bad faith argument to undermine precedent.

It's not the undermining of precedent (for its own sake) that matters here. It's the contents of the precedent that are presumably bothersome to the upthread poster. Comparisons to precedents overturned in the name of progress are entirely reasonable to examine whether its the matter of precedents in general or specific contents that are issue.

That’s the bad faith part. This has nothing to do with precedence and the current Supreme Court will do what it wants and invent new and incoherent forms of logic as needed to do so.

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