the Legal Tender cases, in 1871, reversing the decision which had been
rendered in Hepburn _v._ Griswold fifteen months earlier;[3] and no less
shattering to the prestige of _stare decisis_ in the constitutional
field was the Income Tax decision of 1895,[4] in which the Court
accepted Mr. Joseph Choate's invitation to "correct a century of error".
The "constitutional revolution" of 1937 produced numerous reversals of
earlier precedents on the ground of "error", some of them, the late Mr.
James M. Beck complained, without "the obsequious respect of a funeral
oration".[5] In 1944 Justice Reed cited fourteen cases decided between
March 27, 1937 and June 14, 1943 in which one or more prior
constitutional decisions were overturned.[6] On the same occasion
Justice Roberts expressed the opinion that adjudications of the Court
were rapidly gravitating "into the same class as a restricted railroad
ticket, good for this day and train only".[7]

Years ago the eminent historian of the Supreme Court, Mr. Charles
Warren, had written:

However the Court may interpret the provisions of the
Constitution, it is still the Constitution which is the law
and not the decision of the Court.[8]

In short, it is "not necessarily so" that the Constitution is preserved
in the Court's reading of it.

A third difficulty in the way of the theory that Judicial Review is
preservative of the Constitution is confronted when we turn to consider
the statistical aspects of the matter. The suggestion that the
Constitution of the United States contained in embryo from the beginning
the entirety of our national Constitutional Law confronts the will to