Remember:

✓ Landmark cases emerge from strategic litigation—advocacy groups spend years building precedent through carefully selected test cases before reaching the Supreme Court

✓ The Court can overrule its own precedents, and does so strategically—Brown overturned Plessy (1896), Loving struck down centuries of anti-miscegenation laws, Dobbs reversed Roe after 50 years

✓ Social movements with resources for multi-decade legal campaigns shape which cases become landmarks—the NAACP spent 18 years building to Brown, LGBT rights groups built from Lawrence to Obergefell over 12 years

✓ Who sits on the Court determines which cases succeed—the same constitutional text yields opposite results depending on whether justices prioritize expanding or restricting rights

Remember:

✓ Landmark cases emerge from strategic litigation—advocacy groups spend years building precedent through carefully selected test cases before reaching the Supreme Court

✓ The Court can overrule its own precedents, and does so strategically—Brown overturned Plessy (1896), Loving struck down centuries of anti-miscegenation laws, Dobbs reversed Roe after 50 years

✓ Social movements with resources for multi-decade legal campaigns shape which cases become landmarks—the NAACP spent 18 years building to Brown, LGBT rights groups built from Lawrence to Obergefell over 12 years

✓ Who sits on the Court determines which cases succeed—the same constitutional text yields opposite results depending on whether justices prioritize expanding or restricting rights