The authority of Supreme Court precedent

Narrowing Supreme Court Precedent from Below

Lower courts supposedly follow Supreme Court precedent—but they often don’t. Instead of adhering to the most persuasive interpretations of the Court’s opinions, lower courts often adopt narrower readings. For example, recent courts of appeals’ decisions have narrowly interpreted the Court’s rulings on police searches, gun control, and campaign finance. This practice—which I call “narrowing from...

Maintaining access to safe abortion in the United States: a post-Gonzales primer and guide to action.

Women's health specialists were rightfully alarmed by the April 2007 Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart. In criminalizing the “intact dilation and extraction” abortion procedure and banning its use even to protect a woman's health, the U.S. Supreme Court has—with shocking ease— rejected science, overthrown legal precedent safeguarding women's health and seized authority over medical ...

Chapter 2: Explaining the Interpretation of Precedent

Recall from chapter 1 that the Court’s treatment of precedent takes two broad forms, positive interpretation and negative interpretation. First, the Court can interpret a precedent positively by relying on it as legal authority and thus broaden its reach or at least reiterate its continuing legal relevance. When doing so, for example, the Court can indicate that a precedent is controlling or de...

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...

Has Precedent Ever Really Mattered in the Supreme Court?