Dames & Moore v. Regan, a 1981 separation-of-powers ruling by then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, has an unusual place in Supreme Court history: Rehnquist's law clerk that term was John Roberts, the future Chief Justice. Decades later, Roberts downplayed the case during oral argument, telling counsel that the Court had gone out of its way to describe its decision as narrow and unlikely to apply beyond the specific dispute.
Rehnquist himself saw the case differently. In a 1984 speech at South Texas College of Law, he drew a direct comparison between Dames & Moore and Gibbons v. Ogden, calling them "similarly important" and of "comparable importance." He noted that oral argument in Gibbons spanned twenty hours, while Dames & Moore received only two. The author of the Reason piece observes that few at the time—and likely few today—would rank the two cases equally: Gibbons remains a canonical Commerce Clause decision, while Dames & Moore never surpassed Justice Jackson's Youngstown concurrence in influence.
The episode is a reminder that judicial legacy is not fixed. The author also reflects on how justices assess their own work: Justice Scalia once named Crawford v. Washington his most important opinion before later favoring District of Columbia v. Heller, while Justice Thomas has said he does not dwell on his opinions after writing them.