The Disney plaintiffs' lead counsel, Steven Schulman of Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, recently said that "the precedential impact, if we get a judgment, will be a profound wake-up call for corporate America".
I hasten to add that this event probably has, as the lawyers say, limited precedential effect.
QUESTION FROM TURNERJDESOTO1: In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court committed one of the baldest and biggest usurpations of political power in American history — without Constitutional, legal, legislative, or precedential standing.
QUESTION FROM MICHAEL: What are your thoughts on the language in Bush v. Gore that it shall not be considered precedential?
The I.T.C. has become a trendy forum for patent disputes because it holds several advantages over the federal court: it can make speedy decisions without costly discovery; it has a limited appeal process; and its decisions do not have precedential effect, meaning that if Samsung lost at the I.T.C., it could try again in federal court.
Given that, he said, the case should be decided on grounds so narrow that the decision would have almost no precedential effect.
It does not take account of the precedential and other constraints that are in play or how much a decision moves the law in a conservative or liberal direction.
In dissent, Justice Alito wrote that "the court's decision creates a precedent about precedent that may have greater precedential effect than the dubious decisions on which it relies".
But Ms. Mayer, the Senate counsel, said: "It's a precedential matter.
WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court took up a race discrimination case on Monday brought by black firefighters from Chicago, the justices were alert to the precedential shadows cast by two of their recent decisions.
The court might decide, for example, to issue a ruling dismissing the case as improvidently granted — a judicial "never mind" that would leave the decision by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit standing, and with little precedential value outside California.
