It's amazing that we got through four pages without citing Wickard v. Filburn (although the modern case upholding it, Gonzales v. Raich, has been listed) or Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (and here the modern case, South Dakota v. Dole, hasn't been listed either).
Not really; the Court has not handed down any scandalously bad decisions since 2014. I don't think Rucho v. Common Cause is a decision that will stand the test of time or that history will remember particularly fondly, but it scarcely belongs on a list of the worst decisions ever.
I could list many others not cited here.
Wickard is absurd, but what about:
- Newberry v. United States (though overturned; produced the absurd conclusion primaries were not elections)
- Corrigan v. Buckley
- City of Los Angeles v. Lyons – legitimized implicit bias in the criminal justice system
- Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (vastly worse than Engel v. Vitale because it limited the voluntary freedom of students)
There is probably a special place for decisions which weren't even wrong, but where the Court's reasoning was extremely malicious: the Warren Court tended to uphold good policy using the Commerce Clause in an attempt to underline that legislative power under the Commerce Clause was effectively unlimited, but it's hard to cite those cases since terrible policy has been upheld under the Commerce Clause as well. But Griswold v. Connecticut, a case where the majority opinion goes out of its way to say that the Court can make whatever determinations it wants regardless of the Constitution, has reasoning that's especially noxious, especially given that it would have been extremely easy to say there is a right to privacy or bodily autonomy in the plain language of the Fourth Amendment rather than reaching for penumbras.
, decided back in 1911, has to be the worst example of that. The way the Court defended a corporate income tax before the Sixteenth Amendment seems to me to be totally lacking in logic, especially given its striking down of an income tax sixteen years before, although the
Flint Court did have eight new members.
