That still leaves the problem of how to explain a shift in a judge’s thinking,and it is here that the quotation from Justice Jackson comes in handy. It is“one of three available quips held in reserve for such occasions,” Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in 2011 in The Georgetown Law Journal.

The second, from an 1827 opinion by Justice Joseph Story, has the virtue of age but little else. “My own error,” he wrote, “can furnish no ground for itsbeing adopted by this court.”

But the third is a keeper. “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in a 1949 dissent.

Professor Driver said that third adage is “the most commonly invokedlanguage to acknowledge a judicial change of heart.” Justice Ginsburg hascited it, as has Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

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