Stare Decisis: Rhetoric and Substance

Abstract

Stare decisis allows common law to develop gradually and incrementally. We show how judge-made law can steadily evolve and tend to increase e¢ ciency even in the absence of new information. Judges'opinions must argue that their decisions are consistent with precedent: this is the more costly, the greater the innovation they are introducing. As a result, each judge e¤ects a cautious marginal change in the law. Alternative models in which precedents are either strictly obeyed or totally discarded would instead predict abrupt large swings in legal rules. Thus we …nd that the evolution of case law is grounded not in binary logic …xing judges'constraints, but in costly rhetoric shaping their incentives. We apply this …nding to an assessment of the role of analogical reasoning in shaping the joint development of di¤erent areas of law.

Securing Property Rights

“…2 Judicial discretion is central to the analysis of legal rules (Frank 1932;Posner 2005). Courts' ability both to bias their interpretation of the law and to distort their findings of fact is a crucial factor driving the evolution of tort law and liability (Gennaioli andShleifer 2007, 2008;Ponzetto and Fernandez 2008;Fernandez and Ponzetto 2012), as well as the development of contract law and the evolving structure of privately optimal contracts (Gennaioli 2013;Gennaioli and Ponzetto 2017). 3 Our distinction between disputable and indisputable facts is different from that between verifiable and nonverifiable facts used as a foundation of incomplete contracts (Hart and Moore 1988).…”

Función de las cortes supremas de Brasil y Chile en la generación y gestión del precedente judicial entre lo público y lo privado

“…Sólo en los casos en que exista un espacio de discrecionalidad que derrote esa interpretación y aplicación que constituye el precedente de modo que en la resolución del problema jurídico propone la práctica de una justificación universalizable, como en las situaciones de "distinguishing" 65 . b) Por otra parte, la Corte Suprema tiene que cumplir con el requisito de universalidad en la justificación de sus decisiones judiciales, para asegurar que, al definir la "respuesta correcta" (y final) que revestirá la autoridad que vinculará todos los demás tribunales y jueces, está actuando de manera racional e igualitaria 66 . Claro que el precedente horizontal plantea desafíos (en el caso de tribunales superiores que funcionan en salas o cámaras especializadas), pero consideramos que comenzando por lo más complejo de aceptar que es el supuesto vertical, aquel resulta fácilmente abordable.…”