in this lesson we will explore how different types of legal authorities relate to one another and also take a look at the role that each of these types of authorities will play in different parts of the court system now in order to do that we need to understand an overarching principle in the common law legal system and that is a principle known as starry decisis it literally means from the latin let the decision stand and under the principle of starry decisis courts are with limitations that we will discuss are generally supposed to follow past precedent in other words if a court in the same jurisdiction has already decided an issue then a later court that is of the same or lower position in the legal system is bound to follow that prior case in other words the court has no autonomy to make a different decision if the same facts are before it now there are consequences to a system of starry decisis and those consequences include both benefits and costs one benefit of starry decisis is that it will tend to promote stable and predictable law now you can see why that would be because knowing what courts have done in the past you should be able to predict what a court will do in the future if given a similar set of facts another benefit of starry decisis is that it will tend to improve judicial efficiency and the reason it would do that is it avoids the reinvention of legal principles the common law system developed in a situation where courts were sort of having to create law on the fly as it were every time a new case came up the court would have to think through what this meant think about this in the context of the middle ages or later in england where courts were operating locally and deciding principles as they went along well once a court has had to go through those mental gymnastics to come up with a rule the idea is it shouldn't have to keep on doing that so in theory at least starry decisis should lead to a more efficient judicial system in the sense that less time is spent on coming up with new legal rules now there are costs to starry decisis of course and so the flip side of that judicial efficiency is an inefficiency which is a legal system built on past precedent requires a fact-intensive review of past precedent because in truth no two cases tend to be exactly alike and so there's always an open question out there of whether the new case is similar enough to the old case that the rule should apply in the same way so the the legal system in a common law jurisdiction like the united states tends to be very fact intensive and lawyers do in fact spend a lot of their time looking at previous cases to see what courts have done and why now a second cost of story decisis is that it applies across the board in general now there there are exceptions to this but in general courts are obligated to follow badly decided precedent if the case is on point then a court should continue to follow it now there are famous examples of this and you often will hear about these from the u.s supreme court in particular where a court has decided to overrule a past precedent because something about it just didn't make sense going forward note however that that's the exception the reason that cases being overruled are in a sense very newsworthy is because it doesn't happen that often most of the time and certainly nearly all the time in the case of lower courts those courts are obligated to follow precedent whether or not it was a good legal decision so starry decisis has benefits and it has costs but what you need to know as if you will a prospective client in our view of the legal system is that starry decisis is the baseline that we're always considering in looking at a legal question now when i refer to old cases and new cases something that i have left out in some descriptions of that is the concept of jurisdiction and in fact not every court can decide every issue so starry decisis only applies when courts are in the same jurisdiction so uh here in the on the slide you'll see three different requirements for starry decisis to apply first courts need to be as i said in the same jurisdiction so that might mean in the same state and if a state supreme court decides an issue then all the lower courts in that state would be obligated to follow it but not courts that are in a different state likewise in the federal system where federal law is at issue the federal courts are going to be required to follow decisions of a higher court now we're going to see some of the boundary lines for where these court systems are set up and we'll see they don't always line up in ways that we might expect without having taken a look at the map now notice that starry decisis requires that the decision be from a higher court a lower court cannot overrule a decision of a higher court now a court at the same level can overrule its own decision but even there starry decisis cautions against doing that so but for for the decision to be mandatory it has to be from a higher court now a third requirement of sorts is that the past decision must be published and that actually is rather a common sense principle if the case is decided and not reported in some place where other litigants can become aware of the decision then it's it's not out there to be followed you might think of that as the judicial equivalent of if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it did it really make a sound in the case of legal cases if the decision is not recorded somewhere then there's no way it can have starry decisis effect now i should warn you that publication also can have a different meaning in the sense that a case some cases are not sent to the printers to be used in the bound printed case reporters those traditionally are cases that we would call published cases but that distinction has started to break down a bit as cases have become more widely available on internet sources so while it is true that cases that are formally designated for publication are the ones that will have strong starry decisis effect even those ones that are quote unquote unpublished cases can have some persuasive effect but in a technical consideration of starry decisis the case must actually be published and that usually means that at least a version of it is available in the print reporters so having decided that jurisdiction is important here and we're going to come back to that and look at some maps showing where some some jurisdictions exist we also need to be aware of the concept of primary authority and secondary authority because if one looks at a law library you will find both of these types of authority and you need to know that not all law books are created equal and that's true when the when the books as i'm calling them actually exist in an online database so primary authority which you will come across as you as you look at legal authority generally refers to the law itself so we need actual sources of legal rules and these are the sources that we spoke about in the previous lesson cases statutes administrative regulations we could also put in their constitutions anything that actually has the force of law in some physical location is a primary authority now we contrast primary authorities with something else that you'll frequently find in a law library or in online resources and those are secondary authorities the easy way to remember when something is a secondary authority is if you find something and it is not the law instead it talks about the law it is as i say here a description or commentary on the law now secondary authorities are incredibly useful because a lot of times they will synthesize a lot of primary authority law and explain what it means and so it can help prevent a lawyer from having to reinvent the wheel if he or she gets to go back and look at these secondary authorities but you need to be aware that secondary authorities are not the law and as a result they could sometimes be wrong a secondary authority is only as good as the work that was done into putting it together in the first place so if something is a description or a commentary on the law it is secondary but if something is a case or a statute or a regulation that has impact in a particular jurisdiction somebody's obligated to follow it let's say then that is a primary authority now that we know that we can go on to what looks to be an intimidating chart but this one at chart is actually not that we need to know where starry decisis applies so this is in essence the more detailed application of what we've already talked about in this lesson so let's go to the easy part look at the bottom of this chart dealing with secondary authority secondary authority is not required to be followed anywhere so it is not mandatory it doesn't bind anyone in any location and so another implication of that moving over to the box next door is that secondary authority is always persuasive nobody is required to follow it now good secondary authorities can be highly persuasive and very well respected but nonetheless it is not something that we would consider primary and therefore it can never be mandatory having looked at secondary authorities let's move up to the top of our chart and look at legal rules when must primary authorities be followed because in fact sometimes a primary authority can be persuasive this gets us back into the concept of jurisdiction and a lot of times jurisdiction will refer to location in what area must a legal rule be followed so primary authorities such as constitutional provisions statutes and regulations if they're enforced within a particular area or jurisdiction then those rules are mandatory for courts that are also located in that jurisdiction so an easy example let's take a state like texas laws that are passed by the texas legislature or cases decided by texas courts are going to be mandatory within the state of texas or at least within part of the state of texas now look at the second box under mandatory and notice that decisions from higher courts within a jurisdiction are going to be mandatory authority for lower courts in the same jurisdiction and that's that's a concept we've already explored but just realize even within a state a rule could be slightly different because of different judicial boundaries in where where higher court cases were decided and we'll come back to that and look at some maps in just a moment now in contrast some primary authorities can be persuasive they don't bind anyone so decisions from courts within one jurisdiction let's say oklahoma are only persuasive authority for courts within another jurisdiction like texas so courts of one state are not obligated to follow decisions of the courts of another state however those decisions can be useful so attorneys will often cite decisions that are primary authority but that are not binding and the idea here is that these authorities are well reasoned or they show a trend in the law but regardless of that it would be inaccurate to say that a court must follow this primary authority when it is only persuasive okay so if you go outside of your jurisdiction be it a state be it a federal court of appeals district or area then one is not required to follow those authorities even though they're primary now decisions from lower courts within a jurisdiction are persuasive authority to the higher courts and that makes sense a higher court is not required to follow decisions of its lower courts indeed those decisions frequently can be overturned but note that it can sometimes be useful to a higher court to see what its lower courts have done so a supreme court may look at its various court of appeals districts and see for example that every court of appeals district has reached the same result and that would be persuasive to it that yes perhaps it ought to reach the same result so in when one sees a piece of legal authority you need to know that just because it's primary authority doesn't mean it binds whoever you are dealing with because it may be from another state from another court of appeals district and so forth so for now just keep in mind the fact that any legal authority or if you will any piece of legal writing that you pull out of a law library could be primary or it could be secondary and then where it is primary it could be binding or it could also be persuasive non-binding because it's from outside the jurisdiction that is important because starry decisis only applies to primary legal authority that is within the same jurisdiction now i've referred to secondary authority and i want to list up here on the screen various types of legal authority that are secondary these are things lawyers refer to that are that can be useful but they are not themselves something that a court or other government agency is actually obligated to follow legal encyclopedias and treatises are extended organized discussions of the law perhaps in a particular area encyclopedias try to cover everything and of course they can only do this at a very high level sometimes treatises will take on a particular area of the law like contracts or torts or employment law and go into a more detailed discussion of that one area another type of secondary authority that one would find in law in a law library are law reviews these are periodical publications that include scholarly treatments of the law often written by law professors judges and sometimes by legal practitioners another type of detailed treatment of the law is put together in american law reports or alr annotations and alr annotations are often built around a particular case and then the annotation that follows that case tries to gather a lot of material from a lot of different jurisdictions to see how courts and other authorities have treated that same area of the law that's represented in the one case suffice it to say that if a person is researching and they find an alr annotation on point it will point to lots of potentially useful primary authority as well as having a secondary discussion of what the law means restatements of the law uniform laws and model acts are scholarly works that have been put together to try to organize the law in the case of a restatement or in the case of uniform laws and model acts they're actually proposals for what the law ought to be with the suggestion of course that legislatures might adopt these acts restatements are built on what court decisions are out there that have already where courts have already reached some sort of a consensus on a rule at least generally and uniform laws and model acts are directed more toward legislatures the important thing to know is that all of those authorities though they are useful they are only persuasive and then finally legal newspapers even something as simple as a magazine or newspaper type periodical could state something useful about the law but again it's only secondary in nature finally i've been referring to court structure and weight of authority within the same jurisdiction and we need to realize that some courts are higher than others in terms of their authority in the united states the typical model is there is a highest court then there is an intermediate appellate court and then at the bottom are trial courts that actually hear cases in the first instance the way this would work for a given piece of litigation let's say a party files a lawsuit is that case would be resolved in the trial court and in the event that there is some error in the trial court to be complained of there is an appeal as of right to the intermediate appellate court which must hear the appeal above that the highest court often will only hear appeals that it decides to hear and so it gets to pick and choose among intermediate appellate court decisions as litigants are saying please please hear our case so you'll often hear that a case has been petitioned for example to the united states supreme court on something called a writ of certiorari and that just means that the parties have asked the supreme court to hear the case remember all court opinions are primary authority but not all court opinions are mandatory if a decision or an opinion is from a higher court in the same jurisdiction that will make the opinion mandatory authority for the lower courts but again if we go to higher courts then the decisions of lower courts are primary persuasive authority now i keep referring to geographic divisions of the court system for purposes of starry decisis one way in which this may not be intuitive to you if you're not already familiar with the federal court system is the fact that the federal court system is divided up into districts and circuits the united states supreme court of course has jurisdiction over the entire nation but below that the intermediate appellate courts are what we call circuit courts of appeal those are numbered 1 through 11 and then there's also two special circuits called the district of columbia circuit and federal circuit that tend to hear certain subject matters of cases these geographic regions are then themselves have gatherings of states within them so to take a local example where i live the fifth circuit court of appeals consists of texas louisiana and mississippi so any decision by the fifth circuit court of appeals is binding on those three states but it would not be binding let's say in arkansas because arkansas is located in the eighth circuit court of appeals now as we get down to the trial court level you may notice that some of the states on this map have lines dividing the state up into smaller districts those are the where district courts are located and those courts in that particular piece of the state are all considered to be within the same district now every state has at least one district so for example colorado which is not divided is simply the district of colorado for federal purposes but we go to a state like texas and we see that texas with a larger population has been divided up into multiple districts northern southern eastern and western although the location of those may not be geographically intuitive likewise california is divided into the northern southern eastern and central district so the the names are not always going to be the same and states with higher population tend to be divided into more divisions this same thing actually happens at the state level so let's take a look at texas as our example the court of last resort here the texas supreme court or for criminal cases the texas court of criminal appeals has jurisdiction over the entire state but our intermediate appellate courts have geographic divisions and you see a basic map of those here at the right side of your screen and those decisions of course of appeals would bind all the lower courts within that same region and then trial courts of course are going to be very local now if we zoom in on this map a little more closely you'll see that the texas divisions of courts tend to be by county that a district is located in a particular area and that area is defined by it consists of these counties and again the divisions may not always be where you would draw the line but it's important to know that for legal purposes a court district consists only of certain counties now there are some quirks in every states system including texas that we won't go into at this point but just realize that geography matters a great deal for when knowing where a case is going to be heard and that brings us to the end of this lesson looking at the relationship among legal authorities and within the court systems