And don't call me Shirley

I will rarely, if ever, get accused of taking the law seriously on this blog. But I do have a legitimate legal question:

At what point does dissenting from, say, a series of related cases become a failure to heed stare decisis principles?

For example, since Seminole Tribe, and on through all the fun state sovereign immunity decisions including the latest like Garrett and FMC, we've seen the exact same 5-4 split on the Court.

At what point are the 4 dissenters "supposed" to give up? It seems to me that if you buy the majority's holdings in all those cases, then FMC should be a no-brainer (that is, if Congress can't abrogate state sovereign immunity except in a very limited set of circumstances, administrative agencies can't either). That the 4 dissented was just part of their view that all the line of cases starting with Seminole Tribe are a load of crap. But when must they give in?

I have no clue. It would seem that if you believe something was wrongly decided, and you were there to dissent at the time, you should be able to stick to your guns, perhaps forever. For example, with the state sovereign immunity decisions dealing with abroagation of immunity in state court, the Court's decisions rest on the idea that states' "dignity" can be found in the "structure and history" of the Constitution, even if it's not written anywhere explicity. Now, if the 4 dissenters think that's bs, should they ever have to give in? I ask this because in the continuing development of the state sovereign immunity doctrine has come from several cases, all of which have the 5 in the majority reaffirming the core principles of that doctine. It would seem "settled," at least for a while.

Then again, who knows. 3 of the current justices would overturn Roe outright, even though it's been reaffirmed in Casey.

I'm also, by the way, thinking about Apprendi v. New Jersey and its progeny, in which the Apprendi dissenters are generally resisting, at least in the cases in which they're still the dissenters (since, e.g., in Harris v. US they sucked Justice Thomas over the line to become the majority).

PS - This whole post reminds me of one of my favorite law school moments of my 1L year. Last year, when in the midst of the commerce clause in conlaw, I remember one late night where I did not start reading until 2 or 3 in the morning (for whatever reason). The next day in class, I opened up my book to Garcia v. San Antonio Metro as we discussed it, but without remembering any of it. Next to Rehnquist's short dissent which ends with the apocryphal line:

"But under any one of these approaches the judgment in these cases should be affirmed, and I do not think it incumbent on those of us in dissent to spell out further the fine points of a principle that will, I am confident, in time again command the support of a majority of this Court."

I wrote simply, "Rehnquist: The South Will Rise Again." Reading it led me to laugh, and then my neighbor read it and laughed too, and then of course I got called on... But it was still an amusing moment.