April 22, 2007

POS 282--Intro. to American Law
Several students have asked about the concept of authority--under what law is the court ruling.

There is a limited set of possibilities for court authority.

The court can base its decision on a constitution, statute, regulation, or ordinance. All of these are authority enacted by a different body, and the court's job is to determine what that enacted authority means and how those rules are to be applied.

The court itself also enacts law in the form of Court Rules, such as the Rules of Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, etc. and the court's job in cases decided under those Rules is to determine what their own rules mean and how those rules are to be applied.

In common law, the court gets to make up the rules, instead of interpreting somebody else's rules (or even their own rules) . The most frequent example of this is in tort law.
In all decisions, the court will usually cite (make reference to) previous court cases (caselaw).

Just because the court cites caselaw, though, doesn't mean that it is those previous cases that are the source of authority for the court's decision. If the decision is a common law case, then the caselaw would be the authority, but if the caselaw is interpreting some enacted law or rule, that law or rule remains the source of the authority.

That's the theory, anyway. Sometimes a court doesn't spell things out completely, and so you just rely on what the court has provided, even if it doesn't spell out the source of the authority.

I think that this explanation will help you get through the Stoddard and Grover cases. The Lowry case is a little more difficult, though, in terms of finding the authority upon which the court is relying. If the court gives you only prior caselaw as authority, then you just use what they give you, even if it doesn't fit neatly into my explanation.