Supreme Court decisions cannot be appealed. No court sits above the Supreme Court, so once it rules, the case is over for the parties involved. But the legal rule the Court announced is not necessarily permanent. A decision can still be undone in four ways: the Court can rehear the case, the Court can overrule itself in a later case, Congress can rewrite the statute the Court was interpreting, or the Constitution itself can be amended.
Each route works differently, and each has its own odds of success. Most are slow. Some are nearly impossible.
Why There Is No Appeal
The federal judiciary has three levels, and the Supreme Court sits at the top. Cases move from district courts to circuit courts of appeals and then, if the Court agrees to hear them, to the Supreme Court itself. Nothing sits above it. That is the end of the line for the parties, whether the case originated in a federal court or came up from a state supreme court on a federal question.
So when people ask whether a Supreme Court ruling can be challenged, the honest answer is that the parties themselves have no further move in court. What can change is the rule the decision established, and that change comes from somewhere other than an appeal.
Petition for Rehearing
The one direct way to ask the Court to reconsider is a petition for rehearing. It has to be filed within 25 days of the judgment.1Legal Information Institute. Supreme Court Rules Rule 44 The same nine Justices who decided the case decide whether to look at it again.
The rules are built to make these petitions fail. A rehearing will not be granted unless a majority of the Court votes for it, and that vote can only be called for by a Justice who was in the original majority.1Legal Information Institute. Supreme Court Rules Rule 44 A Justice who won would essentially have to decide the Court got something wrong. The petition cannot rehash the losing arguments or add new ones. It has to point to a specific error, such as a misread record or an overlooked issue.
Historically, the rare successful rehearing petitions have involved a short-handed Court, where a Justice was absent because of illness, retirement, or death and the remaining Justices split evenly. Granting rehearing in that situation lets a full bench resolve the question. That is more a procedural reset than a change of heart, which shows how unlikely it is for the Court to reverse itself this way.
The Court Overruling Its Own Precedent
The more realistic path is a new case, years or decades later, in which the Court decides its earlier reasoning was wrong. This is not an appeal of the old dispute. The original parties are gone. New litigants bring a new case that raises the same legal question, and the Court uses it to overrule the prior decision.
The principle that discourages this is stare decisis, which holds that courts should stick to their prior rulings for the sake of consistency. The Supreme Court has never treated its own precedents as absolutely binding, though. When it weighs whether to overrule itself, it looks at several factors:2Constitution Annotated. Stare Decisis Factors
- Whether the original decision was well-reasoned or rested on flawed logic.
- Whether the rule it created has proven too difficult for lower courts to apply.
- Whether later decisions have eroded the reasoning, leaving the old ruling an outlier.
- Whether society’s understanding of the underlying facts has shifted.
- Whether people, businesses, or governments have built their behavior around the old ruling in ways that would cause serious disruption if it fell.
No factor decides the question on its own, and Justices routinely disagree about their weight. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court unanimously overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), ruling that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment.3National Archives. Brown v. Board of Education In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Court overruled Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), concluding those decisions had no basis in the Constitution’s text or history and returning abortion regulation to elected legislatures.4Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization No precedent is truly permanent, but overruling one usually takes decades.
Congress Rewriting the Statute
When the Court interprets a federal statute in a way Congress dislikes, Congress can pass a new law. This works because the Court was reading legislation, and legislation can be amended. The ruling about the statute stands, but the statute itself becomes something different.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 is a clean example. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), the Court held that a worker’s deadline to file a pay discrimination claim started when the employer first made the discriminatory pay decision, even if the worker did not discover the disparity for years. Congress found this interpretation “significantly impairs statutory protections against discrimination in compensation” and passed a law resetting the clock so every discriminatory paycheck triggers a new filing deadline.5Congress.gov. Public Law 111-2, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009
Congress used the same approach after Employment Division v. Smith (1990), which lowered the legal bar for laws burdening religious practice. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 restored the stricter standard that had existed before. Legislative overrides are the most common institutional response to unpopular Supreme Court decisions on statutes, because they need only a simple majority in each chamber and the President’s signature.
There is a hard limit, though. If the Court’s decision rests on the Constitution rather than a statute, ordinary legislation cannot override it. A law that directly contradicts a constitutional ruling would be struck down itself. Congress can sometimes craft legislation that pursues a similar goal while working around the constitutional reasoning, but that is a much narrower exercise and not always possible.
Amending the Constitution
The strongest response to a Supreme Court decision is amending the Constitution. An amendment removes the constitutional ground the Court stood on and effectively erases the ruling. The difficulty of the process matches the size of the result.
Article V requires a proposed amendment to pass both the House and Senate by a two-thirds vote, then be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.6Constitution Annotated. Overview of Article V, Amending the Constitution That means 38 of 50 states have to agree. The Constitution has been amended only 27 times in more than two centuries, and only a handful of those amendments were direct responses to Court rulings.
The Eleventh Amendment (ratified 1795) was the first. After the Court held in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) that federal courts could hear suits against states brought by citizens of other states, states with Revolutionary War debts pushed back and the amendment barred those suits.7Visit the Capitol. Resolution Proposing the Eleventh Amendment, January 14, 1794 The Sixteenth Amendment (ratified 1913) overrode Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895), which had struck down the federal income tax. The amendment gave Congress explicit power to tax income without apportioning the tax among the states by population.8Constitution Annotated. ArtI.S9.C4.4 Direct Taxes and the Sixteenth Amendment
These examples show both the power and the impracticality of the amendment route. When broad supermajorities agree, an amendment can wipe a ruling off the constitutional map. Building that level of agreement on a contested legal question is very rare, which is why most disagreements with the Court get resolved through legislation or the slower path of waiting for the Court to revisit its own precedent.