Stare Decisis

Stare decisis, a doctrine fundamental to common law decisionmaking, requires a court to resolve disputes within the framework provided by the rationales and results of prior cases addressed to similar legal and factual relations. It seeks to reconcile the law's two great warring imperatives, that which requires a rational scheme of consistent authority serving the broad social goals of predictability, uniformity, and finality, with that which demands individual results informed by principle and applied with flexibility and discretion—in a word, justice. On the one hand, by focusing on how legal theory has interacted with fact on correlative earlier occasions the doctrine begets constancy and neutrality and thus constrains the judicial impulse to make law. Yet on the other hand, stare decisis recognizes that unquestioning loyalty to precedent invites stagnation; accordingly, it commands that courts depart from otherwise governing precedent when adherence would disserve the ends of fairness or rational judgment. The doctrine of stare decisis requires of a court that would accommodate these tensions a certain resolute suppleness, the hallmark of a truly principled process of decisionmaking.