Stare decisis and precedent in the Supreme Court | US government and civics | Khan Academy
As we've talked about in many videos, the United States Supreme Court has a very different role than the executive or the legislative branches. The executive branch, of course, runs the government. The legislative branch, they make the laws and set the budgets. The Supreme Court can rule that a law is unconstitutional, or it can interpret laws in a specific case.
When the Supreme Court justices make these decisions, they try to follow the principle of stara decisis, which is Latin for "let the decision stand." It's this idea of taking previous decisions as an example, and if we're in a similar case now, then just use that decision as an example for this one. This is closely associated with the idea of precedent. Precedent, in everyday language, means something that has happened before, an action or decision that we can use as a guide or as an example. That's exactly what the Supreme Court tries to do.
If the Supreme Court has made a previous ruling on a similar case, that would be considered a precedent for this case. The Supreme Court has been often described as umpires, like umpires in a baseball game. Even Chief Justice John Roberts described it as such during his confirmation hearings. It's this idea that they should be these objective arbiters of what the truth is, of what is constitutional, what is not, and what does the law actually mean.
But we know, in reality, these are human beings. No matter how unbiased and no matter how objective they try to be, they still bring to the table their views and their experiences. So, even though this seems like a very clean process, there's definitely a large degree of subjectivity here. Because the executive branch, in particular, the president, can appoint Supreme Court justices, there are definitely examples in history of changes in politics having long-term effects on changes in the Supreme Court.
For example, a significant case of overturning precedent happens from 1896 to 1954. In 1896, you have the Plessy versus Ferguson case, that we cover in several other videos, where the then Supreme Court rules that laws that involve segregation are okay. But then, you fast forward almost 60 years, and then the Supreme Court, in Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, ruled that "no, separate but equal" is not constitutional; that segregation is not okay. This was influenced by this idea of, over time, you had presidents who were able to make judicial appointments to the Supreme Court as members of the Supreme Court died or retired.
It went through a Senate confirmation process, and then these justices have life tenure. They can stay on the Supreme Court until they pass away or until they decide to retire. So, many historians would say that this overturning of precedent was due to a change in politics from the 1930s through the early 1950s. You had several terms of FDR, and then you have President Truman, who appointed justices to the Supreme Court that would eventually rule on Brown versus Board of Education, and they would be more pro-civil rights.
What's interesting about this is, even though presidents try to appoint folks who they believe would maybe vote the way they would or have similar views, many times it doesn't always work that way. For example, President Eisenhower, who was a Republican, appointed Justice Earl Warren, who was a Republican governor of California. But Warren ended up being famous for taking more liberal stances than not, including on Brown versus Board of Education.