"I understand that judges, including Justices of this Court, may decide cases wrongly. I also understand that later-appointed judges may come to believe..."

"... that earlier-appointed judges made just such an error. And I understand that, because opportunities to correct old errors are rare, judges may be tempted to seize every opportunity to overrule cases they believe to have been wrongly decided. But the law can retain the necessary stability only if this Court resists that temptation, overruling prior precedent only when the circumstances demand it. It is one thing to overrule a case when it 'def[ies] practical workability,' when 'related principles of law have so far developed as to have left the old rule no more than a remnant of abandoned doctrine,' or when facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have robbed the old rule of significant application or justification.' [Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 854–855 (1992).] It is far more dangerous to overrule a decision only because five Members of a later Court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question. The majority has surrendered to the temptation to overrule Hall even though it is a well-reasoned decision that has caused no serious practical problems in the four decades since we decided it."

Writes Justice Breyer, dissenting in Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt, in which a 5-man majority overruled Nevada v. Hall, 440 U. S. 410 (1979). Under Hall, a state could permit a private citizen to use its courts to bring a lawsuit against another state without the consent of that state. Today's decision interprets the Constitution to mean that the states retain sovereign immunity from these suits.

Both the majority and the dissent analyzed the question of overruling precedent following the factors laid out in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that reconfigured Roe v. Wade, restating it in terms of its "essence," but declined to overrule it. Breyer's dissenting opinion today gestures at future abortion cases. He writes: "To overrule a sound decision like Hall is to encourage litigants to seek to overrule other cases...." and "Today’s decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next."