"Let us note but two examples of the use of precedent in the construction of a historical narrative that, in turn, works to supply authority and legitimacy. The first is found in “Planned Parenthood v. Casey”, the 1992 Supreme Court decision upholding, while limiting, abortion rights under the Amendment. In the now famous opinion by Justice O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter, those justices took pains to explain their own reservations about “Roe v. Wade”, whose “essential holding” their opinion in Casey was intended to reaffirm. “Some of us,” the justices noted, “find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision.” It could not do so if they were to uphold their duty to protect the “liberty of all” and to respect their obligation to “follow precedent.” This obligation flows from “the very concept of the rule of law,” which, in their view, “requires such continuity over time that a respect for precedent is, by definition, indispensable.” Yet in spite of this rather striking defense of the role of precedent in our legal system, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter went on, almost as if to take back what they had just said, to note that adherence to precedent was not “an inexorable command.” The decision whether to adhere to precedent was, in their view, always one that had to be guided by “prudential and pragmatic considerations,” including whether the rule developed by a prior case has proven to be unworkable, whether people have come justifiably to rely on it, and whether subsequently developed principles of law have rendered the prior rule a nullity. By taking this pragmatic and prudential approach to precedent the three justices constructed an historical narrative that made room for the possibility of change, of evolution. They wrote a history of constraint, yet also of possibility, rather than of an iron hand of the past inexorably determining present policy. They allowed themselves to be seen as “judging” a past that they themselves first had to interpret. Yet they acknowledged that the past created a presumption in favor of continuity and that in no case should a decision to overrule precedent, and in so doing to rewrite history, rest simply on a “belief that a prior case was wrongly decided."