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Stare Decisis And The Supreme Court(S): What States Can Learn From Gamble, Zachary B. Pohlman

Notre Dame Law Review

While almost all questions before the Supreme Court require statutory or constitutional interpretation, state courts of last resort occupy a unique place in the American judicial landscape. As common-law courts, state supreme courts are empowered to develop common-law doctrines in addition to interpreting democratically enacted texts. This Note argues that these two distinct state court functions—interpretation of statutes and constitutions, and common-law judging—call for two distinct approaches to stare decisis, a distinction that is often muddied in practice. Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Gamble v. United States provides the framework for each approach, a framework based on the genesis and development …