RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:USA Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) 2022 Re: Biotech and ChinaStare decisis enhances the stability and predictability of tort law by ensuring that change is gradual. It recognizes that people rely on court rulings as existing law.
The primary reason for changing precedent in all areas of law, particularly in constitutional law, is to overrule precedent that contains obvious or manifest error.
This notwithstanding, tort law, and the procedural and evidentiary issues surrounding it, is anchored in centuries-old common law. Over the past century, the most successful departures from stare decisis have been guided by these core principles of change and stability.
Advances in science and technology can provide compelling reasons for courts to change common law rules in order to give effect to an underlying principle of tort law. . For example, scientific learning may make certain types of evidence more reliable than previously considered. The challenge for judges is to ensure science is not used as an excuse to undermine tort law. For example, through x-rays, CAT scans, blood tests, and other mechanisms, science may be able to detect changes at the cellular and, potentially, subclinical levels. In the field of toxic torts, such changes may occur after exposure but provide no indication that the person will develop an injury. Thus, the enhanced ability to detect these changes does not alter when a cause of action may arise; the tort law principle is that a plaintiff must have an injury and damages to have a cause of action.
The common rationale for these decisions is that tort law exists to compensate individuals for actual harm-harm that results in pain or some objective manifestation of injury that people can see, touch, or feel. At some point, the use of "distinctions" of a precedent, which is the preferred method for departing from precedent, should give way to a recognition that the precedent is no longer valid.When courts break from precedent, even with the best of intentions, the new rule could have unintended consequences in its real life application.
Most tort law develops in state courts, thus reflecting a decentralized system where states can establish the law to reflect the values and nature of their own communities. But, tort law does not develop independently in each jurisdiction. For this reason, particularly in instances of first impression, state courts often take stock of how other courts have applied tort law principles in comparable situations. State courts have generally accepted the rationale for national uniformity with the obvious caveat that the departure from precedent must reflect a positive change in the law.
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3798&context=sclr#:~:text=Stare%20decisis%20enhances%20the%20stability,court%20rulings%20as%20existing%20law.