Some time ago, before everything in the world got too crazy, a friend of mine approached me to write a post about the Top Ten Supreme Court Cases. I was immediately interested, and we spent the rest of day volleying cases back and forth until we settled on ten of the most important cases in American history.

What makes a Supreme Court case worthy of the list? For the purposes of this listicle, my soon-to-be-lawyer friend Jeff and I have decided to only consider cases that are both ground-breaking and advance people’s rights. There’s no denying that a case like Plessy v. Ferguson is “important” but it also created the doctrine of “separate but equal” which no one alive today would argue is a good thing.