This chapter presents a normative justification of stare decisis, that is, of a court's presumptive deference to its own prior decisions. Critics often contend that valid epistemic reasons to follow precedent-reasons based on the notion that following precedent will lead to better decisions-do not exist. The author argues, however, that a judge may have both "procedural" and "substantive" epistemic reasons to follow precedents with which she disagrees. Procedurally, a presumptive obligation to follow precedent can force a judge to confront opposing arguments and articulate strong reasons for disagreeing with them, thus improving her own decisionmaking. Substantively, the case-by-case process of generating precedent, involving the input of many judges over time, may generally be superior to ad hoc decisionmaking by a single judge or court. As a conceptual matter, the author argues, these epistemic reasons truly are reasons to follow precedent, because they might apply even when a judge believes a given precedent was decided incorrectly.
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false...
Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two...
This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...
Sometimes a police officer can only stop a fleeing suspect by striking or shooting him. When is it morally justified to use such force rather than let...
This short essay considers Benjamin Zipursky’s intriguing effort to identify a tradition of “American natural law theory” that links Benjamin Cardozo...
In the years since the publication of our book, How Constitutional Rights Matter, many scholars from around the world have engaged with our research...
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting...
Although Lon Fuller’s importance and reputation among those who practice general jurisprudence remains contested, it is clear that he remains a major...