I understand that Case Law refers to the use of previous court rulings in order to influence future ones in the absence of a hard and fast law or regulation to flesh things out, but it seems like many, many court rulings are given out all the time. When different court rulings make conflicting determinations about a specific issue, what’s used to determine which ruling should be followed?
Along that same topic, are there requirements that must be met for a specific court ruling to be “useable” for the purposes of Case Law?
**Edit:** I’m thinking about this more in terms of US law, although it would be interesting to hear if this differs from country to country.
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Generally speaking nothing is binding as precedent until the US Supreme Court has ruled on it. And if the Supreme Court is going to reverse an earlier decision, they need to explain why.
It’s possible that lower courts (like the District Appeals Courts) could make conflicting rulings on similar cases. For example, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had found that gay marriage bans in Nevada and Idaho were unconstitutional in 2013, but the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that gay marriage bans in Michigan and Ohio were okay in 2014. The Supreme Court ultimately decided in 2015 that the Michigan and Ohio gay marriage laws were unconstitutional, which means that all state gay marriage laws were unconstitutional.
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