Revista da EMERJ - V. 20 - N. 2 - Maio/Agosto - 2018

 R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 20, n. 2, p. 8 - 53, Maio/Agosto. 2018  42 recent controversial decisions such as Roe v. Wade and Engel v. Vitale generally have won the endorsement of the nation’s cultural elite, which tends to be both better educated and more socioeconomically advantaged than the average American. 171 Thus, while nearly half the country has criticized the abortion decision and more than half has opposed the school prayer ruling, the Court’s defenders exercise re- latively greater economic, political, and cultural clout, thus reducing the likelihood that these rulings will diminish the Court’s stature. Even more dramatically, opponents of Plessy v. Ferguson , 172 the Court’s first decision rejecting an equality-based challenge to racial segre- gation, exercised almost no power at all. Whites overwhelmingly endorsed Plessy , and African Americans at the turn of the last century were politically disfranchised and economically marginal. 173 Conver- sely, an important component of the opposition to Reynolds v. Sims , 174 the reapportionment decision, consisted of politicians, who wield enormous political power. (Overrepresented rural dwellers also op- posed Reynolds , though such groups were, by definition, a minority of the population.) These politically influential critics of Reynolds nearly were able to secure a constitutional amendment overturning the decision. 175 Yet, once that effort had failed, Reynolds quickly ge- nerated its own powerful constituency of supporters: Politicians elec- ted under the one-person-one-vote regime of Reynolds had a vested interest in defending that decision. 176 Some constitutional issues fade away and others linger. The Court’s prestige is not jeopardized by controversial or even unpo- pular rulings on issues that quickly lose their saliency. For example, the public controversy over Dred Scott , which was intense in the late 1850s, 177 dissipated rapidly once the Civil War and post-war cons- titutional amendments had abolished slavery and guaranteed black 171 On this culturally elite bias of judicial review, see Michael J. Klarman, What’s So Great About Constitutionalism?, 93 Nw. U. L. Rev. 145, 188-92 (1998). 172 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 173 See generally Michael J. Klarman, The Plessy Era, 1998 Sup. Ct. Rev. 303. 174 377 U.S. 533 (1964). 175 David Kyvig, Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the United States Constitution, 1776-1995, at 374-76 (1996). 176 John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust 121 (1980) (“[T]he incentive of elected representatives is not necessarily toward malapportionment but rather toward maintaining whatever apportionment, good or bad, it is that got and keeps them where they are.”). 177 See supra note _.