Volume 104 Issue 1 Article 8 September 2001 Stare Decisis as a Constitutional Requirement Thomas Healy Sidley Austin Brown & Wood Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr Part of the Common Law Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Thomas Healy, Stare Decisis as a Constitutional Requirement, 104 W. Va. L. Rev. (2001). Available at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol104/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the WVU College of Law at The Research Repository @ WVU. It has been accepted for inclusion in West Virginia Law Review by an authorized editor of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Healy: Stare Decisis as a Constitutional Requirement STARE DECISIS AS A CONSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENT Thomas Healy Is the rule of stare decisis a constitutional requirement, or is it merely a judicial policy that can be abandoned at the will of the courts? This question, which goes to the heart of the federal judicial power, has been largely over- looked for the past two centuries. However, a recent ruling that federal courts are constitutionally required to follow theirprior decisions has given the ques- tion new significance. The ruling, issued by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit,argues that stare decisis was such an established and integralfeature of the common law that the founding generation regarded it as an inherent and essential limit on judicialpower. Therefore, when the Consti- tution vested the 'Judicial Power of the United States" in the federal courts, it necessarily limited them to a decision-making process in which precedent is presumptively binding.