The doctrine of stare decisis
The Supreme Court follows a tradition of honoring precedent — most of the time. Here's everything you need to know:
What is stare decisis?
It's a centuries-old legal principle stating that judges should defer to past interpretations of statutes and the Constitution. It comes from the Latin expression stare decisis et non quieta movere, meaning, "to stand by things decided and not disturb the calm." Erring on the side of upholding precedent makes the law seem "evenhanded" and "predictable," then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in 1984. Justice Louis Brandeis had gone further in 1932, writing, "In most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right." But periodically throughout U.S. history — about 232 times, to be precise — justices have disregarded stare decisis and overruled their predecessors. A 5-4 conservative majority appears poised to do that with Roe v. Wade, and Justice Samuel Alito devotes a substantial chunk of his leaked draft opinion to arguing why Roe was "egregiously wrong from the start" and thus unworthy of stare decisis.
When can precedent be overruled?
Whenever a majority of Supreme Court justices feel like it. Some legal scholars argue that a select group of old, landmark cases should be considered irreversible "super precedent," but the court has observed repeatedly that stare decisis is not an "inexorable command." In a 2020 opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh mapped a seven-prong test for applying stare decisis: the quality of the precedent's reasoning, the precedent's consistency with other decisions, changes in law since, changes in facts since, the decision's "workability," the degree to which people have come to rely on it, and the precedent's age. Nearly everyone agrees, at least in theory, that it's not sufficient for new justices to personally disagree with earlier rulings on ideological grounds. In 2018, when five conservatives ruled that the First Amendment protects public-sector employees from being forced to pay union dues if they're not members, Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of overturning a 1977 precedent "for no exceptional or special reason, but because it never liked the decision."
What's been overturned?
Some of the Supreme Court's most momentous decisions rejected precedent. Perhaps most famously, in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ended racial segregation in public schools, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine established in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. In 1976, the court ruled that Georgia's administration of the death penalty didn't violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, invalidating a decision from just five years earlier. More recently, the court in 2003 deemed laws banning sodomy and gay sex to be unconstitutional, reversing a 1986 decision, and in 2015 identified a right to same-sex marriage, overturning a one-sentence ruling from 1972. The 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, striking down limits on corporate campaign spending, overturned two decisions, one as recent as 2003. When the court upheld President Trump's travel ban, in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts went out of his way to disown the infamous 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, which let stand the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. "Korematsu was gravely wrong," Roberts wrote, and "has no place in law under the Constitution."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doctrine-stare-decisis-095509499.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
