Three Supreme Court Failures and a Story of Supreme Court Success

The Supreme Court is not the institution that I once revered, writes Erwin Chemerinsky in The Case Against the Supreme Court-a provocative, important work that also happens to be a great read. Chemerinsky\u27s claim is that the Supreme Court ought to be protecting vulnerable minorities from repressive majorities, but it has not done so. The Court has frequently failed, throughout American history, at its most important tasks, at its most important moments, he argues.\u27 This is Chemerinsky\u27s case against the Supreme Court, and it is a sweeping indictment. Of the cases Chemerinsky cites to prove his point, three stand out as particularly strong examples of the Supreme Court\u27s failure to protect: Plessy v. Ferguson,4 Buck v. Bell,5 and Korematsu v. United States. Plessy is the 1896 decision that upheld \u27separate but equal\u2