Rebuilding an Out of Control Legal System. This enables courts frequently to ignore legal precedent. It makes predictability, consistency and steady decisions virtually impossible, Schmier warns. Thus, many courts do not even follow their own decisions. This fosters controversy and chaos, congesting the courts, and multiplies legal fees because people cannot be sure what the law is when planning their affairs and then resort to the courts to resolve disputes which would be settled if the law were knowable.
Many legal scholars agree.
As it stands now, justices decide before writing whether their opinions will be important enough to publish. This discretion enables the justices to bury their opinions whenever they wish. This is very wrong, Schmier says. Because these unpublished opinions cannot be cited as precedent, there is no pressure on the Supreme Court to correct errors in these decisions which if published would create unreasonable system-wide rules of law with resulting public outcry and demand for reversal. Buried decisions evaporate without a real trace.