Just another example of why “stare decisis” and over-reliance upon precedent-setting cases has been a disaster. It’s just stupid. Why would you ever want to compound a serious judicial error by locking it in (stare decisis) and then building an ever-shakier legal house of cards upon that flawed foundation (precedent)? To do that is to propagate error through subsequent decisions, which just causes the error to grow and spread, causing ever more damage.
I understand the general need for consistency, and the ability to know that a past ruling can be relied upon in the future, but when a case is brought before a court that challenges the foundation for an existing law, EVERY court should prioritize the original intent of the legislators, or where a constitutional question is at issue, the original intent of the Constitution’s framers, over lazy reliance upon case law.
If some court somewhere had decided that 2+2=5, based upon some lawyer’s “novel” reasoning, and later related cases were decided in favor of that interpretation, upholding it and maybe even expanding it a little further each time, it wouldn’t be surprising to see some much later downstream decision concluding that not only does 2+2=5, but perhaps any two numbers added together equal whatever number one imagines.
We certainly saw that extreme after an activist court “found” a non-existent right to privacy in the Constitution and used it to justify abortion. Over time and subsequent cases, we eventually landed at a woman being able to kill her child at any point in the pregnancy, even after the child was born alive, and for any reason whatsoever. And the miracle it took to stop any further downward slide toward hell and finally end the legal foundation on the federal level for abortion was a court that finally decided to just read the Constitution and forget about precedent or stare decisis.
I am convinced that case law and stare decisis are more often than not the devil’s playthings. The two combined provide a leftist activist court with the perfect tools to corrupt the original intent of legislation and then open the door for later courts to expand the original evil as far as they want to take it. All they have to do is “find” some non-existent principle, as in Roe v. Wade, and then “evolve” the case law over time by pushing a little farther with each subsequent decision, creating a one-way ratchet toward the desired leftist outcome. That would not be possible if later courts examining related cases did their own examination of the relevant legislators’ original intent EVERY TIME, and gave very little weight to a previous court’s reasoning. In fact, doing so would serve as a quality check on previous decisions. Using my previous example, it would be like actually doing the math to test whether a previous court’s determination that 2+2=5 is correct, instead of taking that court’s word for it. It would be highly likely most courts would discover that it actually equals 4, thereby stopping the 2+2=5 propagation chain dead in its tracks.
OK, dead horse thoroughly beaten. Sorry about the repetitiveness, but the insanity of this legal practice really ticks me off.
Just another example of why “stare decisis”...