Turning corners: The role of third-party briefs in overruling precedent

Legal precedent defined in court judgments shapes the behaviour of forward-thinking governmental and non-governmental decisionmakers as past precedent provides clues about the likely outcomes of future legal disputes. To avoid undermining the stability and predictability of law, courts are unsurprisingly loath to overrule existing precedent. Previous studies suggest that the rare occasions of courts overturning precedent are tied to ideological differences between a past precedent’s authors and the judges currently sitting on the bench. In this paper, I argue that this observed relationship is conditional on current judges learning that continued adherence to past precedent would lead to unfavourable societal outcomes. The model shows that information supplied by governmental and non-governmental actors during case proceedings allows judges to update their beliefs about the actual effects of precedent on relevant stakeholders, and to decide when to leave even precedent crafted by a predecessor with divergent preferences on the books and when it is time to chart a new path in jurisprudence.