The law "shouldn't change just because the faces on the Court have changed"

That's according to Sandra Day O'Connor in this law.com article.

O'Connor was invoking the principle of stare decisis, a legal term that means prior case law should be respected and followed when deciding current cases. It's a foundational principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence, and is used as a way to prevent courts from making broad, sweeping, and sudden changes in case law.

The problem is, usually the people advocating stare decisis are the same people who shrugged at the blatant abuse of federal court power during the Earl Warren court. It's one thing to argue that current courts should follow precedent, but how do these same scholars square that with their support of, say, Lawrence v. Texas, which certainly didn't follow the precedent of Bowers v. Hardwick?

What about the line of cases leading to legalized abortion, a dismal case that tried desperately to find a constitutional underpinning for the right to kill one's offspring? There was certainly no precedent for that before the 1960s.

Then there's the Miranda v. Arizona case, which completely rewrote police procedures in a way certainly not supported by previous cases. And on the basis of Miranda, we've seen a host of decisions "protecting" criminals from themselves by basically stifling any police contact prior to the introduction of defense counsel.

It's understandable that O'Connor is so hot under the collar about the direction of the court. It's not taking her nonsensical "nuanced" approach to the law, where every idea has to be separately litigated because the Supreme Court distinguishes every possible case from every other one. The law.com article points out that the recent Gonzales v. Carhart (partial birth abortion ban) decision overturned O'Connor's abominable decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. But while O'Connor was the swing vote in that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy had been on the side to uphold such bans. In other words, these cases were close enough that reasonable minds could find differently.

O'Connor has a point that stare decisis is a bedrock principle of our jurisprudence. But the rule of law has been abused for decades by liberals who cannot get legislation passed and choose to persuade five justices rather than 300 legislators. I don't expect O'Connor to chastise liberal lawyers who bring such cases instead of seeking the legislative path where such cases belong. That would mean actually adhering to the Constitution, not some nuanced interpretation of it.