Opinion ID: 103736
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: practical considerations.

Text: The Court says that its judgment is part of the price of our federal system. It is a price that we did not have to pay yesterday and that we will have to pay tomorrow, only because this Court has willed it to be so today. This Court may follow precedents, irrespective of their merits, as a matter of obedience to the rule of stare decisis. Consistency and stability may be so served. They are ends desirable in themselves, for only thereby can the law be predictable to those who must shape their conduct by it and to lower courts which must apply it. But we can break with established law, overrule precedents, and start a new cluster of leading cases to define what we mean, only as a matter of deliberate policy. We therefore search a judicial pronouncement that ushers in a new order of matrimonial confusion and irresponsibility for some hint of the countervailing public good that is believed to be served by the change. Little justification is offered. And it is difficult to believe that what is offered is intended seriously. The Court advances two intensely practical considerations in support of its present decision. One is the complicated and serious condition if one is lawfully divorced and remarried in Nevada and still married to the first spouse in North Carolina. This of course begs the question, for the divorces were completely ineffectual for any purpose relevant to this case. I agree that it is serious if a Nevada court without jurisdiction for divorce purports to say that the sojourn of two spouses gives four spouses rights to acquire four more, but I think it far more serious to force North Carolina to acquiesce in any such proposition. The other consideration advanced is that if the Court doesn't enforce divorces such as these it will, as it puts it, bastardize children of the divorcees. When thirty-seven years ago Mr. Justice Holmes perpetrated this quip, it had point, for the Court was then holding divorces invalid which many, due to the confused state of the law, had thought to be good. It is difficult to find that it has point now that the shoe is on the other foot. In any event, I had supposed that our judicial responsibility is for the regularity of the law, not for the regularity of pedigrees.