US Supreme Court May Be Poised To Ditch More Of Its Precedents

washington : The U.S. Supreme Court has given itself more opportunities to overturn its own past decisions in the coming months; It’s a sign that conservative justices are rethinking how much fidelity they owe to legal precedents set years ago by the nation’s highest judicial body.

A case argued Monday opens in a new tab includes one of the precedents before the court; The court’s 6-3 conservative majority has moved American law significantly to the right in recent years, including reversing past decisions that rolled back abortion rights in 2022.

In Monday’s case, a 1935 precedent that presidential powers are limited is a challenge to the legality of President Donald Trump’s removal of an official at a federal agency established by Congress with safeguards against presidential interference. Trump’s Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to strike down the precedent, an action that would expand the Republican president’s authority.

“This will be another blockbuster episode in which we will see whether legal precedent—and the fundamental principle that the court’s prior opinions should bind its decisionmaking today—remains a restraining force,” said Wilfred Codrington, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York.

BASIC LAW PRINCIPLE

A fundamental legal doctrine called “stare decisis,” Latin for “standing by what has been decided,” calls on courts to respect their previous precedents when resolving new cases on similar issues. A fundamental principle of US law is that stare decisis promotes consistency and predictability in law.

Stare decisis was, of course, never absolute. Courts make mistakes and must correct them over time.

That precedent was set Monday in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The resolution stated that Congress has the authority to protect certain federal agencies from full presidential control.

Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, is appealing Trump’s decision to fire her from the consumer protection agency in March. The administration called Humphrey’s Executive Board’s decision “deeply wrong,” arguing that the Constitution grants the president sole control over the executive branch of the U.S. government.

The justices will hear arguments Tuesday in another case in which the Trump administration is urging the Supreme Court to overturn a 2001 decision restricting how much money political parties can spend on campaign advertising with input from candidates.

In a different election law case discussed earlier in the court’s current nine-month term, Louisiana Republicans challenging an electoral map that increased the number of black-majority congressional districts asked the justices in October to overturn an election law precedent set in 1986.

abortion decision

One of the Supreme Court’s themes in recent years has been the rejection of precedents hated by conservatives.

In 2022, Roe v. 1973, which recognizes the constitutional right to abortion. Wade decision overturned. In 2023, he overturned decisions allowing race-conscious affirmative action college admissions policies, including those issued as recently as 2016.

Then last year the court struck down a 1984 precedent that required federal agencies to be deferred in interpreting the laws they enforce, a principle that underpins American administrative law.

The cases involving Slaughter and the Louisiana voting map give conservative justices more opportunities to overturn precedents set during more liberal periods of the court’s history.

Judges will wrestle with the precise contours of stare decisis. Justice Louis Brandeis, a prominent figure who served on the court from 1916 to 1939, summarized the principle this way: “In most matters, the rule of law applicable is more important than its correct determination.”

Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous decision in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution, overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which provided a constitutional justification for segregation in public life.

COURT DEFENSE

It is a matter of ongoing debate whether the court, in its current structure, sufficiently respects the stare decision.

Conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who was appointed president by Trump in 2020, said in an October interview with the New York Times that “the court takes the precedent quite seriously.”

Barrett argued that under the 20-year leadership of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has shown greater adherence to precedent than under her two chief justices, William Rehnquist and Warren Burger.

The court under Roberts overturns precedent about once a year, Barrett said, adding that the court under Rehnquist and Burger does so at a rate of 2-1/2, or three precedents, per year.

David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in Minnesota, said focusing on the average number of precedents overturned each year is misleading, especially given that the court’s caseload has decreased significantly since the 1980s.

Schultz conducted a statistical analysis showing that the six current conservative justices vote to reject constitutional precedent more often than the current liberal justices.

“The pursuit judgment doctrine is changing and weakening in important ways,” said Michael Gentithes, a law professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.

In the 1992 abortion rights case Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court listed five factors to consider when deciding whether to invalidate a prior decision; for example, whether the precedent is easy to follow and whether people structure their lives accordingly.

Conservatives on the court have not strictly adhered to that framework, Gentithes said. When deciding whether to overturn a precedent, Gentithes said they largely focus on whether the prior decision’s justifications were weak.

Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe, was particularly willing to embrace this weaker version of stare decisis, Gentithes said.

Codrington said that although the Supreme Court has a long history of overturning precedents, “it happens very frequently on this court, and most of the time it’s on a 6-3 line,” reflecting the court’s ideological divide.

“And this court does that in big cases, so everybody feels that,” Codrington said.

Robert Luther III of George Mason University law school in Virginia said the court’s conservative members adhere to a legal philosophy called originalism, which holds that constitutional provisions should be read according to their meaning when they were written.

“This is an original court, and originality is about the correct application of the law rather than what previous courts have said about the Constitution,” Luther said.

Luther called Humphrey’s Execution a deeply flawed decision that “adopts a view of the executive branch that bears little resemblance to reality.” Luther said the 1986 and 2001 election law precedents had already been undermined by more recent decisions supported by the court’s original proponents.

“This term is an opportunity to reduce confusion in the lower court by introducing precedents that align with where the law has already turned,” Luther said.