Principle
The principle of stare decisis can be divided into two components.
The first is the rule that a decision made by a superior court, or by the same court in an earlier decision, is binding precedent that the court itself and all its inferior courts are obligated to follow. The second is the principle that a court should not overturn its own precedent unless there is a strong reason to do so and should be guided by principles from lateral and inferior courts. The second principle, regarding persuasive precedent, is an advisory one that courts can and do ignore occasionally.
Read more about this topic: Binding Precedent
Famous quotes containing the word principle:
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world.... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“I ... observed the great beauty of American government to be, that the simple machines of representation, carried through all its parts, gives facility for a being moulded at will to fit with the knowledge of the age; that thus, although it should be imperfect in any or all of its parts, it bears within it a perfect principle the principle of improvement.
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—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)