Authority, Precedent, and Principle

Precedent and Legal Authority: A Critical History

Precedent and Authority in Antonin Scalia's Jurisprudence

The authority of Supreme Court precedent

We construct the complete network of 30,288 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1754 to 2002 in he United States Reports. Data from this network demonstrates quantitatively the evolution of the norm of stare decisis in the 19th Century and significant deviation from this norm by the activist Warren Court. We further describe a method for creating aut...

Informative Precedent and Intrajudicial Communication

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that...

Unit precedent