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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
To Say What The Law Is: Rules, Results, And The Dangers Of Inferential Stare Decisis, Adam N. Steinman
To Say What The Law Is: Rules, Results, And The Dangers Of Inferential Stare Decisis, Adam N. Steinman
Faculty Scholarship
Judicial decisions do more than resolve disputes. They are also crucial sources of prospective law, because stare decisis obligates future courts to follow those decisions. Yet there remains tremendous uncertainty about how we identify a judicial decision’s lawmaking content. Does stare decisis require future courts to follow the rules stated in a precedent-setting opinion? Or must future courts merely reconcile their decisions with the ultimate result of the precedent-setting case? Although it is widely assumed that a rule-based approach puts greater constraints on future courts, two recent Supreme Court decisions—Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes and Ashcroft v. Iqbal—turn this conventional …
Precedent And Jurisprudential Disagreement, Amy Coney Barrett
Precedent And Jurisprudential Disagreement, Amy Coney Barrett
Journal Articles
This Article, a contribution to a symposium on constitutional foundations, maintains that an unappreciated function of stare decisis is that of referee between competing visions of the Constitution. Stare decisis is styled as a doctrine of error-correction, but in controversial cases, "error" is often a stand-in for disagreement about first principles. In these cases, stare decisis functions less to guide the business of correcting mistakes — a conception that oversimplifies the reality of pluralism on the Court — than to mediate intense disputes about the Court’s role in interpreting the Constitution. Identifying this function of stare decisis offers a different …
Suboptimal Social Science And Judicial Precedent, Ben Grunwald
Suboptimal Social Science And Judicial Precedent, Ben Grunwald
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.