SUPREME COURT’S Epic Failures Exposed – SHOCKING Repeats!

Front view of the Supreme Court building with large columns and steps under a blue sky

When even the Supreme Court’s “worst decisions ever” lists agree across left and right, it raises a blunt question: if the referees keep blowing the biggest calls, who is really guarding the Constitution?

Story Snapshot

Across the political spectrum, scholars now publish “worst Supreme Court decisions” lists that look surprisingly similar on some of the most damaging cases.
Cases like Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu show how Court errors helped entrench slavery, segregation, and mass internment before later reversals.^[1]^[2]^[4]
Other rulings, such as Citizens United and Bush v. Gore, fuel fears that the Court has tilted the system toward money and partisanship.^[1]^[2]
These rankings highlight a deeper concern shared by many Americans: powerful institutions correct themselves only after ordinary people have paid the price.^[3]^[4]

How “worst ever” lists expose repeat failures of constitutional judgment

Legal commentators from very different perspectives now compile rankings of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions, and the overlap reveals a pattern of profound institutional failure. A CuriosityU list names eleven infamous cases, including Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu, Bush v. Gore, and Citizens United, framing them as moments when “our highest court gets it terribly wrong.”^[1] A separate Law & Liberty survey of conservative and libertarian scholars similarly flags Dred Scott and Plessy as catastrophic errors while condemning other decisions for abusing judicial power.^[2]

Book-length treatments reinforce this theme. Carolina Academic Press’s volume The Worst Supreme Court Decisions, Ever! describes how justices have “long been all too human” and how the Court has bent “in all sorts of wrong directions” before sometimes correcting itself.^[3] The Brennan Center’s landmark-cases overview likewise calls Dred Scott the Court’s “most infamous decision” and notes that it drove the nation’s slavery conflict toward civil war.^[4] Together, these sources support the view that particular rulings did not just misread the Constitution; they damaged the country.

Racial caste, segregation, and the Court’s own later repudiations

Across lists, cases that created or preserved racial caste rank as some of the worst failures. The Law & Liberty ranking places Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted states to segregate and discriminate against Black Americans, among the Court’s most disastrous opinions.^[2] The Brennan Center explains that the Court later repudiated that segregation logic in Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional and signaling that the earlier regime violated basic equality principles.^[4] That about-face shows the Court itself eventually recognized how far it had strayed from constitutional commitments.

Dred Scott stands out even more starkly. The Brennan Center recounts that this decision denied citizenship to African Americans and pushed the slavery debate to a “fever pitch,” helping drive the country toward civil war.^[4] The conservative survey cited by Law & Liberty calls it the worst disaster in Supreme Court history, quoting language that excluded Black Americans from “the rights and privileges” of citizens.^[2] Those judgments come from ideologically different corners yet arrive at the same conclusion: the Court once used its power to lock in a racial hierarchy that took amendments, war, and generations of activism to unwind.

Civil liberties, democracy, and the fear of a captured Court

Commentators also highlight cases where the Court shrank individual liberty or expanded government control in ways later seen as abusive. The Law & Liberty survey points to Buck v. Bell, which upheld involuntary sterilization with the notorious line “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and Korematsu, which approved mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two, as leading examples.^[2] These rulings show how national-security panic and elite technocratic confidence can override basic human dignity when no institution effectively checks the justices.

More recent decisions ignite bipartisan suspicion that the Court has tilted the political playing field. The CuriosityU list includes Citizens United, reflecting a common view that it expanded the influence of money in politics and weakened constitutional self-government.^[1] Other rankings fault Bush v. Gore for intervening in an election dispute in a way that made the Court appear overtly partisan.^[1]^[2] Across these examples, critics on both left and right see a pattern: when the stakes involve war powers, race, or who wins and funds campaigns, the Court often sides with entrenched power, and any later correction arrives long after the damage is done.