in certain ways and you are assessing the parties arguments and determining within your proper role whether what the appellate courts have said provides the law of decision for the case. but what is important, as you ve mentioned, is the clarity by which courts of appeals and the supreme court need to operate so that the lower courts can actually follow the precedent. i m very conscious of that, as you said, as someone who has had to follow precedent and i would think carefully about that and use my communication skills to insure that the precedents are clear so that lower courts can follow them. thank you. i would like to discuss quickly
focused on making sure that i found the right precedents and applied them faithfully. as i mentioned with respect to my methodology, part of the process is receiving information from the parties in a case, and the parties write briefs and in most cases they identify the precedents that they at least believe are applicable and then the court does its own legal research as well to determine whether all of the relevant cases have been identified. and then you look to see whether there is anything that directly controls, and if it does that s your answer. in many cases, the precedent might be a little bit different
their mistakes, correct, by overruling previous decisions? if the various considerations that the supreme court uses to make that determination is satisfied. have you ever heard a federal judge talk about super duper precedent or super precedent? i have not. i have never seen it, either, in any opinion. i ve heard it here in the judiciary committee on a number of occasions when somebody has a favorite case or outcome that they don t want to see the supreme court revisit. let me ask a minute. obviously your nomination by president biden is historic. and i congratulate you again. i congratulated you previously and i think it has been long overdue. when clarence thomas, the
been reaffirmed by the court and have been relied upon. reliance is one of the factors that the court considers when it seeks to revisit or when it is asked to revisit a precedent. and in all cases, those precedents of the supreme court would have to be reviewed pursuant to those factors because stare decisis is very important. if you are confirmed you would be one of only two justices who has also served on a federal district court. the other being justice sotomayor. in your eight years as a trial judge on the d.c. district court you wrote nearly 600 opinions and presided over nine jury trials and three bench
now to senator cornyn for his line of questioning. we ll start with stare decisis and i ve never figured out why lawyers speak in lat-in rather than in english when describing these concepts by which judges apply precedent. would you agree with me that even under an appropriate stare decisis analysis, that dred scott and pleasey versus ferguson were appropriately overruled by the supreme court? i have not engaged in the actual analysis but i think it is well established now that the cases that overruled dred scott and plessey were correctly decided. yeah, there is a means by which the courts can correct