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Deciding When To Decide: How Appellate Procedure Distributes The Costs Of Legal Change, Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl

Legal change is a fact of life, and the need to deal with it has spawned a number of complicated bodies of doctrine. Some aspects of the problem of legal change have been studied extensively, such as doctrines concerning the retroactivity of new law and the question whether inferior courts can anticipatorily overrule a moribund superior court precedent. How such questions are answered affects the size and the distribution of the costs of legal change. Less appreciated is the way that heretofore almost invisible matters of appellate procedure and case handling also allocate the costs of legal transitions. In particular, …