An audacious US Supreme Court is overturning a number of long-standing precedents, and Overturned offers a lively account of the court's history of overturning prior cases. Citing numerous landmarks, the book gives examples and analyses of 300 cases overruled in its history. The immense controversy surrounding the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, which overruled Roe v. Wade and erased the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, has focused public attention on how and why the Supreme Court knocks down long-established precedents. In his vivid and accessible style, Clarke Rountree recounts the rhetorical pirouettes and linguistic acrobatics the court has deployed to explain its reversal of Dobbs and numerous other landmark decisions. He reviews strategies the court uses to undermine a previous court's standing without undermining its own. He analyzes overrulings across time, by type (constitutional cases versus statutory and common law cases), by the ages of the overturned precedents, with changes in the courts membership, and through other variables.

Rountree provides engrossing accounts of pivotal overrulings in the past, such as when Lincoln's Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase used the Legal Tender Act in 1862 to raise money for the Civil War, then ruled the same law unconstitutional in 1870 when he served as chief justice. Rountree gives a fascinating account of Thomas Edison's attempt to monopolize the burgeoning film industry, which was stopped only when the Supreme Court overturned an earlier patent-rights case in 1917. Finally, Rountree applies his myriad insights to the politically fraught Dobbs case. Overruled makes a valuable contribution to law, rhetoric, politics, and history. Readers interested in the role and function of Americas highest court will find Rountree's account fast-paced, lively, and engaging.