Stare Decisis in Art, Science, and Law

Background

In common law legal systems, precedent is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common-law legal systems place great value on deciding cases according to consistent principled rules, so that similar facts will yield similar and predictable outcomes, and observance of precedent is the mechanism by which that goal is attained. The principle by which judges are bound to precedents is known as stare decisis (a Latin phrase with the literal meaning of "Let the decision stand"). Common-law precedent is a third kind of law, on equal footing with statutory law (that is, statutes and codes enacted by legislative bodies) and subordinate legislation - that is, delegated legislation (in UK parlance) or regulatory law (in U.S. parlance) (that is, regulations promulgated by executive branch agencies). See: Precedent

Science & Math

• "This encouraged Newton to invent the concept of instantaneous changes in motion quantities at one instant of time (velocity and acceleration). These ideas were necessary for the key concept of Newton's Laws of Motion: the invention of his concept of momentum of an aggregated body quantity of motion. This involved the algebraic product of an invariant quantity (mass) and the instantaneous (numerical) value of the velocity, at one instant of time. However, the continuum mathematical limit (zero time separation) has NO correspondence in experimental determinations of velocity but this has not prevented the momentum concept from playing a central role in the mathematics of both classical mechanics and quantum theory. All the problems of QM can be traced to this implicit assumption, as reflecting both macroscopic and microscopic reality.""

See: The Problems of Quantum Mechanics

• "First, the error in the original paper is amazing. He assigned numeric codes to the various countries in the study (1 for USA, 2 for Canada etc.), and then instead of using those to control for country as claimed in the paper, he accidentally used those numbers as multipliers that seriously skewed the results, which would otherwise have made the opposite suggestion. The original paper was covered by 80 media outlets, and the retraction/correction only 4. h/t: RS" Quoting from the article: "In 2015, a paper by Jean Decety and co-authors reported that children who were brought up religiously were less generous. The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American. As it turned out, however, the paper by Decety was wrong. Another scholar, Azim Shariff, a leading expert on religion and pro-social behavior, was surprised by the results, as his own research and meta-analysis (combining evidence across studies from many authors) indicated that religious participation, in most settings, increased generosity. Shariff requested the data to try to understand more clearly what might explain the discrepancy. Psychology Today 201909

Law

Legal History