The Court can reverse its own precedent by reinterpreting the facts it governs.

Evidence

Seventeen years after Bowers, the justices reversed course in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).*° In striking down a Texas law that outlawed same-sex anal intercourse, the Court majority concluded that the Court had misinterpreted the situation in Bowers. The laws in Lawrence and in Bowers “touch{ed] upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home.” The Court maintained that the right to privacy protected a realm of personal autonomy in such matters and thus viewed the conduct in Lawrence as basically similar to the conduct protected in other right-to-privacy cases. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2541

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors the Lawrence v. Texas case to the Bowers overruling, central to any exam on the right to privacy lineage.