One interesting facet of the federal court system is its hierarchical structure. The thirteen Circuit Courts of Appeals that sit directly below the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) must follow the Supreme Court’s binding precedent. The District Courts that sit below the Circuit Courts of Appeal must follow the Supreme Court’s precedent and the decisions of the specific Circuit Court of Appeals that oversees the District Court’s region (see map), but District Courts are not required to follow the precedent of other Circuits.
For example, Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts and Puerto Rico sit within the First Circuit Court of Appeals. The District Court of Rhode Island must follow First Circuit case law, but it is not required to follow Second Circuit case law or any other Circuit.
The Circuits are not required to follow each other’s precedent. The First Circuit can tell the Second Circuit to go pound sand, creating a “circuit split” that often results in the Supreme Court taking up a legal issue after a sufficient number of Circuits have weighed in. Similarly, the individual District Courts within the same Circuit are not required to follow each other’s cases. A United States District Judge sitting in Rhode Island has no duty to follow the cases of a District Judge in Massachusetts.
Things get really interesting on the duty of federal courts to follow their own past precedent. Under the principle of stare decisis (not disturbing what’s already decided), the Supreme Court generally follows its own past cases. The doctrine is not absolute, but for the most part, the Supreme Court treats stare decisis as a rule of law and respects its earlier decisions.
At the Circuit Court level, the three-judge panels that decide appeals are required to follow the past decisions of the same Circuit. When one panel in the Circuit has decided an issue, another panel that comes along later in the same Circuit must follow the earlier decision, unless an intervening Supreme Court decision dictates a different result. This means the First Circuit is free to tell the Second Circuit to go pound sand, but a three-judge panel in the First Circuit cannot tell an earlier three-judge panel in the First Circuit to go pound sand.
The rules are different for District Judges (D.J.s) sitting in the same District Court. There is no legal requirement that a District Judge must follow another District Judge’s decision sitting within the same District, or even the judge’s own past decisions. Over the years, District Judges in Rhode Island have occasionally remarked that D.J.s should follow each other’s decisions as a matter of “intra-court comity,” but it is not a binding rule. As then-District Judge Selya remarked in Fricker v. Foster, 596 F. Supp. 1353, 1356 (D.R.I. 1984):
While the judges of a unified federal district are not constitutionally or legally bound to march in lockstep, the seeds of chaos are sown if a single court prances off in sharply conflicting directions. Lawyers and litigants in such circumstances have little hope of achieving the predictability of results toward which simplification of the judicial process is necessarily targeted. Thus, absent unusual or exceptional circumstances, judges of coordinate jurisdiction within a jurisdiction should follow brethren judges’ rulings.
Notwithstanding this paean to predilection, District Judges in the District of Rhode Island have occasionally disagreed with each other. See, e.g., Rodriguez v. Murphy, No. 12-510-M, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14262, at *1 n.1 (D.R.I. Feb. 1, 2013) (“Judges in this district differ on whether suits against employees of Wyatt should be brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983”).
SCOTUS follows SCOTUS, the Circuit follows the Circuit, so why doesn’t a District Judge have to follow other D.J.s in the same District, or even the D.J.’s own prior decisions? For lots of reasons, as it turns out. Most federal districts are not like Rhode Island and have a large stable of District Judges. The District of Massachusetts, for example, has eighteen sitting District Judges. If each D.J. was required to follow the other judges, it’d be hard to keep track and identify relevant decisions, and many decisions would be prone to legal attack. Things are much less complicated when the D.J.s are bound only by the Circuit that oversees them and the Supreme Court. Unlike the Circuits and the Supreme Court, which communicate their decisions exclusively in writing, District Judges render oral decisions all the time. It’d be virtually impossible for one District Judge to know what all the other D.J.s ruled without ordering court transcripts of all their hearings, which makes no sense. Binding D.J.s to other D.J.s would also stunt development of the law. When novel issues arise, freedom to render conflicting opinions can assist the Circuit in deciding the issue, not unlike how a circuit split assists the Supreme Court in rendering an ultimate decision.
Federal government agencies like the Federal Judicial Center counsel against D.J.s even issuing written opinions, making statements like: “[b]ecause decisions of district judges are merely persuasive authority—that is, they are not binding precedent even in their own districts—publication of such decisions should be the exception. In addition, time constraints argue against writing formal opinions unless the decision involves a novel or complex issue or a matter of public importance and thus may be useful to attorneys and judges or be of interest to the public.” If District Judges are encouraged not to write down the reasoning of their decisions, it’s hard to see how one D.J. can be expected to follow another D.J.
It might make for some tense conversations in the courthouse lunchroom, but in the end, it’s probably a good thing that D.J.s are not legally required to follow other D.J.s.