Saturday, October 31, 2009

Does anyone know a Supreme Court case where the Court said it applied the wrong legal doctrine previously?

I have been working on a law review article all summer and it is almost finished. I just have to find the source for one more footnote. I the want to argue the Supreme Court should apply the Due Process Clause where it previously applied the Eighth Amendment Cruel and Unusual Clause to the same issue. I can't find any cases where the Court said it reached the right result but its own reasoning was flawed. Does anyone know of any?
Answer:
I only vaguely remember this, so you'll have to look into more, but in the area of the right to counsel during police interrogation, the Court initially relied on the 6th Amendment right to counsel as the source of the right, in Escobedo v. Illinois, but then shifted gears and looked at as a 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in Miranda and every case thereafter. I'm not sure they ever explicitly acknowledged the switch, but you could probably a later case that discusses the development of the law and the fact that Escobedo's 6th Amendment was basically a dead end.
In Lawrence v. Texas, they applied due protection clause. In similar cases in the past, they applied equal protection. They didn't overturn anything, they just used different grounds on a similar case.

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