Why Stare Decisis?

Luca Anderlini, Leonardo Felli and Alessandro Riboni

Review of Economic Dynamics, 2014, vol. 17, issue 4, 726-738

Abstract: All Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are sunk. This can generate a time-inconsistency problem. From an ex-ante perspective, Courts will have the ex-post temptation to be excessively lenient. This observation is at the root of the rule of precedent, known as stare decisis.

Stare decisis forces Courts to weigh the benefits of leniency towards the current parties against the beneficial effects that tougher decisions have on future ones.

We study these dynamics and find that stare decisis guarantees that precedents evolve towards ex-ante efficient decisions, thus alleviating the Courts' time-inconsistency problem. However, the dynamics do not converge to full efficiency. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Keywords: Stare decisis; Dynamics of precedents; Time-inconsistency; Case law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C79 D74 D89 K40 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Why Stare Decisis? (2011)
Working Paper: Why Stare Decisis? (2010)
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DOI: 10.1016/j.red.2014.02.001

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