Judicial Decision-Making & Stare Decisis Practice

Judicial decision-making in our Criminal Justice system relies heavily on the practice of stare decisis. This basically means judges are very careful to ground their decisions in precedent. In this week’s forum, assess this judicial decision rule and provide examples to support your points.

Judicial decision-making depends on the practice of stare decisis because it is a law of precedent that is aimed at ensuring justice in the Criminal Justice system. Under this law, the decisions made by the higher courts serve as binding authority on the lower courts operating within the same provincial jurisdiction, while the decisions made by courts of other jurisdictions are to be used as persuasive authority (Crenshaw-Logal, 2012). Assessing the judicial decision rule, it is possible to highlight the benefits of this law. Under the judicial decision rule,  cases should be decided in one and the same manner if the legally material facts are found to be the same. In other words, recurrence of legally material facts allows drawing relevant conclusions and make legally right decisions. According to researchers, legal doctrine and legal rules establish relationship between case facts and case outcomes (Kastellec, 2010). In addition, the application of the doctrine of stare decisis allows courts to consider past cases in order to make statistical analysis of criminal activity and develop new approaches to reduce crime rate. This fact means that reliance on the past decisions that are described as precedent contributes to strengthening legality and validity of court decisions. For example, courts must follow historical cases when they  make a ruling on the case similar to the past cases. Historical cases are known as landmark cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) concerning unconstitutionality of separation of black and white students in public schools, Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) about the legality of the right of criminal defendants to have an attorney even if they have no money to pay for his/her service, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) about the need to advise prisoners of their rights before being questioned by the police. Actually,  the practice of stare decisis is important as it strengthens the role of the US Supreme Court. It is known that all courts are obliged to consider the US Supreme Court’s rulings because it is the highest court in the United States (Crenshaw-Logal, 2012). Thus, all decisions made by the US Supreme Court are obligatory stare decisis for the lower courts in the Criminal Justice system.

References

Crenshaw-Logal, Z. D. (2012). Exploring the Vitality of Stare Decisis in America: Debut Symposium Report for the Matthew Fogg Symposia on the Vitality of Stare Decisis in America. Universal-Publishers.

Kastellec, J. P. (2010). “The Statistical Analysis of Judicial Decisions and Legal Rules with Classification Trees,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 7(2): 202-230.

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
Available at:

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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