To an increasing degree, Supreme Court justices have been explicitly invoking the alleged constraints of stare decisis, especially by way of criticizing justices thought to be ignoring those constraints. But this accelerating use of stare decisis as a rhetorical weapon is at odds with what the data show about the frequency with which stare decisis actually operates as a genuine constraint on Supreme Court decision-making. It is thus not surprising that justices who criticize other justices for ignoring stare decisis are justices who themselves rarely if ever subject their own first-order outcome preferences to the demands of stare decisis. In the final analysis, stare decisis, perhaps unfortunately, serves far more of a rhetorical function than a decision-guiding or decision-constraining one, at least recently, and at least in the Supreme Court.

中文翻译：

---

遵循先例——最高法院的修辞与现实

在越来越多的程度上，最高法院大法官一直在明确援引所谓的遵循先例的限制，尤其是通过批评被认为忽视这些限制的法官的方式。但是，这种加速使用遵循决策作为修辞武器的做法与数据显示的关于遵循决策实际作为对最高法院决策的真正限制的频率的数据不一致。因此，批评其他法官无视守则决定的法官本身很少（如果曾经）让自己的一阶结果偏好服从于守则决定的要求也就不足为奇了。归根结底，也许不幸的是，至少在最近，至少在最高法院，凝视决策的作用远远超过了决策指导或决策约束的修辞功能。