A ten-year commercial lease is a bet on the law. The entrepreneur who signs one is wagering that the rules making it enforceable will mean the same in year nine as at signing. So is the manufacturer deciding whether to build a new facility, and the young couple determining whether they can afford to start a family. None of them reads advance sheets. All of them rely on precedent.
Stare decisis (“to stand by things decided”) is usually reduced to a rule of judicial etiquette under which courts should respect prior decisions. That framing gets the direction right and the reason wrong. The force behind the doctrine is not deference to the past for its own sake. It is the recognition that law must be stable and predictable enough to let people plan their lives. Each decision, whether the lease, the facility, or the family, rests on assumptions about contract enforceability, regulatory stability, property rights, and the countless other rules that shape the contours of the possible. This is what we mean by the rule of law, the capacity to make reasonable predictions and have them hold.
This is why the law abhors arbitrariness. A decision untethered from established principles does not merely produce an unjust result in the moment. It destabilizes the framework in which everyone else operates. If enforcement becomes unpredictable, if settled rules shift without warning, the law stops doing its foundational job. We punish people not for their actions but for failing to anticipate the unknowable.
Overturning precedent is never just about the discrete legal question at hand. When a court reverses course, it changes one rule and signals something about the permanence of all of them. Every rational actor must recalculate, wondering which other settled principles might suddenly dissolve. Most of the cost never appears on any docket. It takes the form of transactions forgone, investments delayed, and plans abandoned.
None of this means precedent can never fall. Law must sometimes evolve to correct grave injustices or adapt to changed circumstances. But the departure deserves the gravity it carries, because every break from things long settled exacts a toll on the predictability and stability that make civilized life possible. Somewhere an entrepreneur is holding a pen over a ten-year lease, betting that things decided will stand.