It is my understanding that the USSC could hear two cases with identical circumstances and produce opposite decisions if they wanted to. I don’t know that they have ever done so exactly. Plessy and Brown aren’t a case of the court totally reversing themselves, are they? One wouldn’t cite Plessy anymore, but didn’t Brown take a different tack?
Thanks,
Rob
IANAL but my understanding is this.
Brown came about a series of carefully planned lawsuits intending to overturn Plessy in the field of education. The architect of the strategy, Robert Carter (IMO its a crime that he is not more well-known by the general public considering it was his work that laid the groundwork for Brown) realized that segregation would never be overturned with just one landmark case but rather a series of small cases leading to the inevitable conclusion that at least in education, segregation was inherently unequal. A technical reading of Brown would imply that if a scenerio were presented outside of education where segregation with equal facilities were truly equal, then Plessy would apply and in that case segregation would be constitutional.
“Identical facts” does not mean “Identical parties”, and that could result in reaching a different legal conclusion.
“Well settled” may be a misnomer to a certain degree I suppose, but basically it means no reasonable mind/jurist could come to any different conclusion when a similar case is presented for review.
Sure there are some cases that leave open a crack, but some no. When the SC had to decide who owned Liberty Island, NY or NJ, once a decision was made, this would be well settled, as an example.
They have decided on the boundaries between states, like Ohio and Kentucky, so both have a clear legal notice of how business on the River is conducted.
I was going to write a nice long answer and show off my (rusting) legal knowledge, but as usual, Wikipedia does a decent job. So, go read this 
From being a law student and reading about a million cases so far, what courts usually do (when they want to reach two separate results) is to distinguish the facts between the similar cases. Basically they say that the facts of this one case make the law we applied in this OTHER case not applicable because of the different facts.
Gratz and Grutter in 2003 come to mind. Both affirmative action cases. Both involving higher education. But one justice (O’Connor) saw a difference in how the facts were being applied.
And, obviously nobody cites Plessy anymore because nobody argues for racial discrimination. But in 1956, lets say, some lawyer might have had in mind that segregation in education was bad, but segregation elsewhere might have a place and use the facts in Plessy to distinguish it from Brown.
If you were thinking of something else please let me know and I’ll try to help..
In England the role of the court is purely to interpret the will of the legislature’s statutes. That’s it. If a case comes to court what the parties are asking is, “what do the statutes mean in practice in our situation?”. I think the situation is different in the US but my guess is that US courts still technically cannot make law - they probably either interpret the meaning of statutes or they interpret the meaning of the Constitution.
What I do know is that under both systems courts cannot simply take different views if the facts are identical. If the highest court wants to take a different view to a previous decision made by the highest court they either have to explain why the facts are different (distinguish the previous decision) or overrule the previous decision (very rare). In practice there’s some scope for courts to ‘invent’ distinguishing facts, but that’s the way it works technically. Someone already mentioned the concept of stare decisis (“stand by what is decided”), or binding precedent, which is the relevant concept here.
You should consult a lawyer on this, and then revisit your post.
This is the definition I would tend to favor. It might be overly restrictive, but I think it gives people a flavor for how the term is normally used. However to play devil’s advocate, everybody thought that the precedents relied on in Citizens United were “well settled”, but the Supreme Court thought otherwise. Still blows my mind but . . . {rantus interruptus.}
In theory, no. But in reality, you never have two cases with identical circumstances so that leaves some leeway for a judge to rule that this case is different than previous cases and issue a different decision.
Part of this is that there are different bodies of law. A law in New York won’t be identical to a law in California. For example, you break into a house and capture the family inside. You then call up the man who owns the house and tell him you want a million dollars or you’ll kill his family. Are you guilty of kidnapping?
In New York, yes. In California, no - California law requires you to take the victim somewhere in order to legally qualify as a kidnapping (there are other laws that would cover the situation I described). So if you were a judge ruling on two apparently identical crimes, you’d have to take into account the fact that one occurred in Brooklyn and one in San Diego.
Settled law as a term of art means that a certain proposition or interpretation of law has been accepted and applied through a line of precedents of the Courts. So in the United States it is settled law that the Federal Courts have the power to strike down legislation which is unconstitutional, while in England and Wales it was until 2000 settled law that the Courts could not strike down an Act of Parliament. In almost all common law jurisdictions it is settled that in a conflict between law and equity, the latter shall prevail.
Something which is not settled law would be a proposition which has only partial or qualified acceptance and whose exact limits are not fully delineated. In England and Wales, there have been two or three lines of authorities on exactly when sexual history can be brought in under the fair trial exception, so its not settled law as of yet.
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In England the role of the court is purely to interpret the will of the legislature’s statutes. That’s it. If a case comes to court what the parties are asking is, “what do the statutes mean in practice in our situation?”. .
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Wrong. The Courts still make and apply what common law which has not been repealed and this can and does result in the making of new law (alongwith novel interpretations of statute law). See Donaghue v Stevenson or the High Trees case or more recently the Anton Pillar Orders, the Merava Injunctions or R v R.
What since about the 18th century(and confirmed in the 19th) the Courts could not do was strike down an Act of Parliament. This was the case until 2000 when the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force. That Act compelled the Courts to interpret all law as much as possible in line with the European Convention of Human Rights and also granted Courts the power to declare certain provisions incompatible with the Convention (though not strike down), which would in effect make that law a dead letter.
The exersize of the latter was seen in the Belmarsh case when the House of Lords invalidated indefjnate detention. In the former scenario, the House of Lords in R v A directed that the Courts read in a proviso (which was expressly forbidden by the text of the Act) into Section 41 of the YJCEA 1999 (on the admissibility of sexual history) in order to preserve compatibility with the convention, in essence making law.
Under US law, there is no legal barrier to the Supreme Court reversing an earlier decision, either expressly or by implication. Their decisions are final, so the only real constraint is the fear that frequent reversals can damage the Court’s institutional crediblity.
There is a presumption that prior interpretations of congressional statutes by the Court will almost never be overturned by a future court, because if Congress thinks the Court interpreted the statute improperly, it can pass a new statute that is written more clearly to reach a different result. For instance, in the early 20th century, the Court ruled that Major League Baseball was not subject to federal antitrust law, because professional baseball was not interstate commerce. Today, pretty much everyone agress that that result was absurd, but Congress has never seen fit to legislate baseball into antitrust law, so the exemption stands. (It has not been extended to other sports).
The Court is more willing to reconsider earlier interpretations of the Constitution, because there is no other real avenue for doing so, since Congress cannot legislate around the Court’s interpretation of a constitutional provision. (It can be done by constitutional amendment, but that process is vanishingly rare).
Supreme Courts rarely depart from settled law. You have to understand that many settlements, program and functions are predicated upon a certain interpretation of law and to so depart would cause anarchy at worst, inconvenience at best. To take an example from my jurisdiction, there is a provision in a certain Act which can be given two interpretations. For the last 40 years, judgements of Intermidiet Appellate Court had held that one interpretation was to be followed, the Supreme had consistently refused to even hear cases dealing with that point. Last year they granted leave to appeal in one case. Lo and behold, they came down in favour of the other interpretation. As a result of this one decision, pretty much everything in that area of law has been turned upside down, based as it was on the earlier line of authorities.
I was actually thinking of the Heller decision. I don’t want to get into a gun control debate, but the Court’s majority and dissenting opinions on the interpretation of the Second Amendment came down to the standard individual right vs. state’s right to have a national guard force with the majority favoring the former. Should a municipality decide to ignore Heller and a party sue for relief under Heller, could the court choose to hear the case and then say no, we were wrong in Heller, so sorry? I guess that they could, but would they do something like that? Or, more likely, would they hear another case regarding some aspect of gun control and in the majority opinion say that the Second Amendment is just a state right?
Thanks,
Rob