The Supreme Court has overturned precedent dozens of times in the past 60 years, including when it struck down legal segregation

theconversation.com ^ | 5/4/2022 | David Schultz

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It is a central principle of law: Courts are supposed to follow earlier decisions – precedent – to resolve current disputes. But it’s inevitable that sometimes, the precedent has to go, and a court has to overrule another court, or even its own decision from an earlier case.

In its upcoming term, the U.S. Supreme Court faces the question of whether to overrule itself on abortion rights. Recent laws in Texas and Mississippi restrict the right of women to terminate pregnancies in ways that appear to challenge the long-standing precedent of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which allowed women to have abortions in most circumstances.

Over the centuries, courts have stated many reasons they should adhere to precedent. First is the idea of equity or justice, under which “like cases should be decided alike,” as one senior federal judge put it. If a court in the past reviewed a particular set of facts and decided a case in a specific way, fairness dictates it should decide another similar case the same way. Precedent promotes uniformity and consistency in the law.

In addition, precedent promotes judicial efficiency: Courts do not have to decide from scratch every time. Finally, following precedent promotes predictability in the law and protects people who have come to rely on past decisions as a guide for their behavior.

But not all precedents are equal, and several current Supreme Court justices have signaled that they might be open to overturning even long-standing rulings that interpret the Constitution.

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The ninth circuit has been ignoring Supreme Court precedence for decades.