This Article studies the Roberts Court’s stealth reversals, in which the Court substantively overturns a precedent without acknowledging doing so. It posits that stealth reversals are a defining feature of the Roberts Court’s constitutional and statutory jurisprudence in ideologically split cases advancing conservative ends. Offering a typology of their various forms, this Article demonstrates that the Roberts Court uses stealth reversals to cloak controversial decisions departing from existing law with the analytic and rhetorical hallmarks of principled legal reasoning and continuity.

Situating stealth reversals with reference to the Roberts Court’s ongoing and acute legitimacy challenges, this Article argues that the Roberts Court has relied on this mechanism of jurisprudential change to bolster its short-term institutional efficacy while pursuing unpopular doctrinal shifts. This realpolitik tool of judicial statecraft bolsters a public narrative about its jurisprudence and the velocity of jurisprudential change. Obscuring the actual processes driving doctrinal change — mainly new conservative appointees who have altered the composition of the Court’s working majority — stealth reversals aim to temper backlash against the Court’s individual decisions and institutional decision-making authority.

This Article contends that the Roberts Court’s stealth reversals subvert the foundation for deliberate and deliberative constitutional debate among nonjudicial actors. They treat the public as manipulable spectators, rather than engaged participants in the shared and ongoing process of constitutional explication. Unlike stealth reversals, express reversals can be empowering and galvanizing tools of constitutional reclamation. Their unambiguous form helps critics convey the pace and substance of judicially imposed legal change as the critics seek to build intertemporal mobilization around countervailing constitutional understandings. Stealth reversals, by contrast, exploit the public’s inability to parse legal doctrine and deprive the Roberts Court’s critics of catalytic and constructive focal points to muster public opposition and resistance.