stare decisis: a standalone construct

William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) gave the classic early statement of the doctrine, that judges are bound to follow the rules laid down in earlier decisions unless those rules are plainly absurd or unjust, an idea English common law had already carried under the maxim stare decisis et non quieta movere, to stand by decisions and not disturb settled matters. The modern analytic account by Frederick Schauer (1987) treats precedent as an argument from the past: a present court is constrained by how an earlier court resolved a similar case, so that the earlier ruling counts as a reason for the later result even when the present judges would decide the merits differently. In practice the doctrine works vertically, where lower courts must follow the rulings of higher courts in the same system, and horizontally, where a court tends to follow its own earlier decisions, which is what gives a body of case law its stability and predictability over time. What makes stare decisis distinctive as a construct is that it locates legal authority in a decision's standing as prior and binding rather than in whether its reasoning is correct, and it distinguishes the binding ratio decidendi, the point a case actually decides, from the persuasive remarks a later court may set aside.[1][2][3]

Unit

A binding legal principle: the rule (ratio decidendi) a prior decision establishes for later like cases

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by reading a prior judgment for its ratio decidendi, then judging whether a later case is materially similar and whether the deciding court is bound by that ruling