Ramesh, I think I differ a bit with that. Big changes are always revolutionary and, in that sense, can appear un-conservative. But that has to be balanced against what they accomplish. If the school system is both a colossal failure and one that promotes an anti-conservative agenda, dramatically changing it into something better would be an outcome that, in the end, would be conservative.

You’ve wisely raised the legal doctrine of stare decisis a few times in some of our discussions around here about originalism and related topics. I think it raises exactly this balancing issue — although, in practice, it’s not done in a very principled way — courts tend to be result-oriented and often play the stare decisis card as an excuse not to revisit or reverse cases that are wrongly decided but have outcomes the judges like.

Sometimes a thing isn’t so bad, and we’ve gotten so used to it that the disruption changing it would cause is not worth the aggravation, so we let it be. (The Court’s Dickerson case in 2000, refusing to set aside Miranda after 30 years, was said to be such a situtation.) Other times, the thing is so bad that we make the change knowing the transition could be painful. (The Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, upholding the separate-but-equal doctrine is one example; Roe, if it were overturned and abortion issues were returned to the political process, would be another.) Either, I think, could be a conservative approach depending on exactly what is at issue.