Determining which case law controls
To see how an attorney uses case law, let's take
a silly example. Let's assume a California attorney is involved in a lawsuit where the
color of the sun is at issue. The attorney is trying to convince the judge that the sun is
yellow. He researches the case law to see if any other courts have previously decided this
issue. If he finds a decision from the Supreme Court, then that ends the matter because
all federal district courts and all circuit courts of appeals must follow the Supreme
Court. Likewise, a decision from a circuit court of appeals must be followed by a district
court, if the district court is within that circuit.
In our example, let's assume that the Supreme
Court has not yet decided the color of the sun, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has
previously decided that the sun is blue and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has
decided that it is yellow. If you go back to the table above, you will see that California
is within the Ninth Circuit. Therefore, even if the district court believes that the sun
is yellow, it has to find that it is blue because the Ninth Circuit has already decided
the issue. This is an example of having to follow legal precedent.
Therefore, an attorney who is researching an
issue in a federal court case is most interested in finding a decision from: (1) the
U.S. Supreme Court; (2) the
particular circuit court of appeals to which his or her case could later be appealed; or
(3) the district court in which the lawsuit is pending.
If the attorney cannot find any relevant case law
from these three sources, then he will look to other circuit courts of appeals and other
district courts. But decisions from these other courts are not binding on the district
court who is hearing the case. The district court judge can accept or reject the reasoning
of these other courts because they are not within the same jurisdiction.
Why is this important? You need to know what a
case citation means and how a particular decision might be very important to someone
living in California (if it is a Ninth Circuit decision), but may be of little importance
to someone living in Florida (where the Eleventh Circuit controls).
Why does a lawyer need to research
case law?
We have discussed what case law is, but in what
situations does an attorney decide to research case law?
If there is a statute addressing the legal issue
the attorney is interested in, he may want to read cases interpreting the statute. For
example, let’s assume an attorney wants to know what amount of proof is necessary to
show that his client is entitled to punitive damages in her gender harassment case. He
knows that 42 U.S.C. Section 1981a states that his client can receive punitive damages if
she can show: "that the respondent engaged in a discriminatory practice or
discriminatory practices with malice or with reckless indifference to the federally
protected rights of an aggrieved individual."
But exactly what does "with malice
or with reckless indifference" mean? In order to interpret this language, he might
look for recent cases on this subject. Fortunately for him, the United States Supreme
Court has addressed this issue in the case of: Kolstad v. American Dental
Ass'n, 119 S.Ct. 2118 (1999).
The point
to remember is that even if a statute directly addresses the issue
the attorney is interested in, he might still look to case law for help in interpreting
the language used in the statute.
Of course, the other typical scenario where an
attorney would look for case law is where there is no statute that directly addresses the
issue he is interested in and he wants to see if any other court has already addressed
this particular issue.
