WASHINGTON--The U.S. Supreme Court has given itself more opportunities in the coming months to overturn its own past rulings, a signal that its conservative justices are rethinking how much allegiance they owe to legal precedents set years ago by the nation's top judicial body.
A case being argued on Monday involves one of the precedents now in the crosshairs before the court, whose 6-3 conservative majority has moved American law dramatically rightward in recent years including by overturning past decisions like in the 2022 case that rolled back abortion rights.
A 1935 precedent that limited presidential powers is at issue in Monday's case, a challenge to the legality of President Donald Trump's firing of an official in a federal agency set up by Congress with safeguards against presidential interference. Trump's Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to ditch the precedent, an action that would expand the Republican president's authority.
"This is going to be another blockbuster term where we'll see whether legal precedent - and the central principle that the court's holdings in previous opinions should bind its decisionmaking today - remains a constraining force at all," said Wilfred Codrington, a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York.
A bedrock legal doctrine called "stare decisis," Latin for "to stand by things decided," calls upon courts to respect their prior precedents when resolving new cases on similar matters. A basic tenet of U.S. law is that stare decisis promotes consistency and predictability in the law.
Stare decisis has never been absolute, of course. Courts make mistakes and need to correct them over time.
The precedent at issue on Monday was established in a case called Humphrey's Executor v. United States. The ruling held that Congress possesses the power to insulate certain federal agencies from full presidential control.
Rebecca Slaughter, who was a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, is challenging Trump's decision in March to fire her from the consumer protection agency. The administration has called the Humphrey's Executor decision "egregiously wrong," arguing that the Constitution grants the president sole control over the U.S. government's executive branch.
The justices are due on Tuesday to hear arguments in another case in which the Trump administration is urging the Supreme Court to overturn a precedent - a 2001 decision that restricted how much money political parties can spend on campaign advertising with input from candidates.
In a different election law case argued earlier in the court's current nine-month term, Louisiana Republicans opposing an electoral map that increased the number of Black-majority congressional districts asked the justices in October to overturn an election law precedent set in 1986.
A theme for the Supreme Court in recent years has been the repudiation of precedents loathed by conservatives. In 2022, it overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion. In 2023, it overturned decisions that allowed for race-conscious affirmative action collegiate admissions policies, including one issued as recently as 2016.
Then last year the court jettisoned a 1984 precedent that had given deference to federal agencies in interpreting laws they administer, a principle that had served as the foundation for American administrative law.
The cases involving Slaughter and the Louisiana voting map give the conservative justices more opportunities to overturn precedents set during more liberal eras in the court's history. The justices will wrestle with the exact contours of stare decisis. Justice Louis Brandeis, a towering figure on the court who served from 1916 to 1939, summed up the principle this way: "In most matters, it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right."
