Legal remedies if a lower court ignores stare decisis? Let's say hypothetically that lower courts en masse decide to ignore Supreme Court decisions. What legal alternatives are available to citizens if lower courts "Go rogue" and decides to ignore a Supreme Court precedent? Is there any punishment higher courts can hand down to lower courts for ignoring their decisions?
The alternative is the same whether just one lower court or many lower courts ignore SCOTUS precedent. An aggrieved parts will appeal the lower court ruling, and the matter will work its way up the ladder until SCOTUS directly rules on this application of the law. This sort of happens all the time, when lower courts don't apply the ostensive "final ruling" because they find that there is some other overriding consideration ("that rule only applies to businesses employing more than 50 people"). Where the case to be remanded to lower courts for further proceedings consistent with SCOTUS opinion and still the lower courts refuse to comply, i.e open rebellion, SCOTUS could rule that non-compliance by lower courts constitutes contempt, and an order could be issued for the removal (in some form) of offending parties (we may presume, the justices of the lower court). The statute outlining court power allows on order of imprisonment for "disobedience or resistance to its lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree, or command". Federal marshals would then arrest non-compliant judges, unless the marshals too are in open rebellion. If the judges in question were federal judges, the marshals would have to decide whether to obey the order of SCOTUS vs. the order of the district or circuit court. Since under the US Constitution states that "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish", it is objectively established that SCOTUS rulings are superior, so provided that the marshals elect to uphold their oath of office, they will enforce the SCOTUS ruling. However, citizen action becomes irrelevant once SCOTUS has made its ruling, and the matter has moved from legal determination of fact to enforcement of established fact.
Actually this is the only SCOTUS ruling on Impeachment because of what it legally means with respect to SCOTUS and impeachment. Namely, Impeachment is a congressional power and not a judicial one that has no punishment beyond the removal from office upon conviction and that therefor it is not a matter that is Judicial. That is a fancy way to say that SCOTUS or any lower court may not hear appeals rising from the outcome of Impeachment. Because of this, it's unlikely to hear any SCOTUS case as to the matter of impeachment and the only outstanding question they could likely hear is "Who can hear an Impeachment Trial for the Vice President?" but thus far none of the 19 impeachment trials have heard involved a vice president. Nixon v. United States basically held that in matters of impeachment it is the court's position that it is likely to respond to this hypothetical with the legal ruling of "not my monkeys, not my circus" (note: not legal jargon). With that said, this makes the U.S. senate the highest court in the land when it comes to precedents set by impeachment cases. The very first person ever impeached was a U.S. Senator, who was expelled by the Senate the same day the House voted on Articles of Impeachment. The decision not to have the trial did establish some notable precedents: first, Impeachment and conviction are all about removing an officer from office and if at anytime before conviction the officer is removed by other means, the process is stopped as it is moot. Second, and more important, is that members of Congress are not "impeachable" officers as both houses have methods that allow them to expel members by vote. This means that the only people who can be impeached are executive officers (the person who is currently president, vice president, and cabinet secretaries, any other office that is appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate, and federal judges) and that a conviction of impeachment does not bar one from holding another federal office unless the senate enacts an additional punishment after the conviction barring that person from federal office. They cannot bar one from state office. Finally, House and Senate Rules have instructions for procedures in their part in impeachment. The commonality between both is that impeachment takes precidents over all regular buisness so once articles are put to the floor, there speaker must hold the vote with in a certain window of time (three days, I think) and the Senate must hold the trial as soon as possible, though will honor reasonable delays as per the impeached officer's right to delay. As a final note, and because it wasn't clear in the question Nixon v. United States is often confused with another case (United States v. Nixon). The latter one did indirectly relate to impeachment in that it was related to President Nixon handing over evidence to the comittee investigating possible impeachment articles against Nixon, and because of that ruling, Nixon handed over the evidence and later resigned to avoid the Impeachment. The former one not only didn't involve anything related Watergate, it also wasn't related to President Nixon at all, but a (former) Federal Judge Walter Nixon, and specifically was heard because Judge Nixon happened to be the first Judge impeached by a Senate commitee as the jury rather than the full Senate, following a rule change that only held full senate as jury for the President and Vice President and a committee for anyone else. The final rule is that only the President is constitutionally mandated to have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court act as the judge in an Impeachment trial, while the presiding officer for all other cases is either the Vice President (acting in his role as President of the Senate) or the President pro Tempore of the Senate (acting in his role of "Guy Keeping the Vice President's Seat in the Senate Rotunda Warm" (not technical Jargon)). Which is why the question of "who is the judge in impeachment of the Vice President?" a noodle baking question, and the answer differs from the Chief Justice to the Senate pr Tempore to the rarely serious argument of the Vice President himself. The best answer is that "It has never come up."
If this judge is truly biased, won't the litigants be all the more glad to have a jury of their peers? You are proposing to abandon your duty to others. At trial you serve the community, not the judge. Back on scope for Law SE: If you refuse to serve on a jury, that could be a separate offense or general criminal contempt, for which you (this all depends on your jurisdiction) could get 30-90 days in jail. Edit: like several others have pointed out, I would not expect much trouble if you politely told the court that you felt you would be biased b/c of past connections. Even if the judge doesn't dismiss you, one of the litigants is likely to strike you. P.S. In most states, no one except a prosecutor (sometimes another state employee) can "take someone" to a criminal court. Individuals can only take someone to civil trial, where one cannot be sentenced, only ordered to pay a judgement.
The relevant statute, 28 USC 455 simply states what shall be, and does not suggest that the law could be enforced by any particular means. There have been cases where there was a suggestion of a hint of impropriety at SCOTUS and yet things proceeded. In Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 Rehnquist did not recuse himself despite being a White House lawyer and having expressed an opinion on the legality of certain arrests, and that was the end of that matter.
How deterministic is the legal system? It depends. And less than we might wish. It depends on the case. How complex is the fact pattern? How strong is the evidence? How clear is the law? How compelling are the legal precedents? Questions of that nature. The only generalization I might make would be that "lower level" cases seem more deterministic than "higher level" cases. By higher level, I mean those heard by a supreme court making constitutional decisions. Here is a web site that has created a prediction market out of supreme court cases. Many have written on this topic. Read this answer. It is an excellent treatise on the subjectivity of the legal system. Written by a real attorney. Read this answer too. My advice: If you seek a deterministic system, don't look to the legal one.
Usually, an attack on the validity or prudence of the underlying order is not a defense to court action to enforce it. Usually, the only exception would be when it was impossible, or practically impossible, to perform the court order for some reason. You could seek to modify the order, but that would be prospective in effect only and usually isn't granted unless there has been a change in circumstances since the original order was entered. You could also bring a motion to set aside judgment (usually this has to be done within six months of entry of an order) on the grounds that this provision was included only due to mistake or irregularities in the process or excusable neglect. But, that only would have only prospective effect.
Every court in the United States from municipal traffic court to a state court to a U.S. District Court has both the right and the obligation to consider claims of unconstitutionality just like any other legal question that a case presents. Contrary to popular misconception, constitutional law issues are not the exclusive province of the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, constitutional issues are only ruled upon in the first instance in the U.S. Supreme Court (or even in a direct appeal from a trial court to the U.S. Supreme Court) in rare and isolated cases. Usually, at least one trial court judge and at least three appellate court judges, and often more appellate court judges, have ruled upon a constitutional issue before the U.S. Supreme Court considers it. This is just as true in Louisiana and Puerto Rico, which have legal systems based upon the civil law legal system, as it is in other U.S. jurisdictions, which have a common law legal system. There is usually only one difference between a case in which the constitutionality of a statute is called into question and one in which it is not. When the constitutionality of a statute is called into question, many state and federal rules of civil procedure require or permit the attorney general of the state whose statute's constitutionality (or the U.S. attorney general when a federal law's constitutionality is at issue) to be joined as a party for the purpose of litigating that issue. This allows the court to receive arguments on the constitutional issue from the public's perspective as well as the perspectives of the parties. A few states also provide that appeals from trial court decisions finding that a statute is unconstitutional are directly to the state supreme court, rather than to the intermediate court of appeals as they would usually be in those states. Notably, the distinct treatment of constitutional issues in many civil law systems is not inherently a part of the civil law system. Constitutional courts are mostly a post-World War II constitutional innovation in the countries where they are found. For example, the &quot;law-screen&quot; doctrine and the existence of a constitutional court in France, is much younger than core of the rest of the civil law system in France, which invented the civil law system in its modern form more than two hundred years ago. Neither France, at the time Louisiana adopted its civil law legal system through the time of the Louisiana Purchase, nor Spain at the time that Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States after the Spanish-American war, had constitutional courts. Footnote Regarding Treaties Also, it is worth remarking that in Europe and much of the rest of the world, the function of protecting individual rights against government authority in a way that is entrenched so that it is not easily overcome by domestic legislation of a current political regime is accomplished through international treaties, rather than only through entrenched rights in a constitution as they are in the United States. Although even then, in many European countries, ordinary courts apply only domestic law and the country in question has to adopt domestic law to conform to the treaties. This treaty mechanism is not very effective in the U.S., because in the U.S., unlike most countries, an ordinary domestic law can override an earlier adopted and ratified international treaty.
united-states Minimum sentencing laws do not prescribe any punishment for a judge that simply refuses to obey them. See 18 U.S. Code § 3553 as an example that explains how sentencing must be enforced, yet no mention of punishments for violating these laws. It also makes mention of how minimum sentencing can be avoided by a judge lawfully as well. Judges do not risk jail time or fines for breaking these laws, as they have judicial discretion, which is literally a power defined by what it means to be a judge, to hand out whatever sentence they think is appropriate. (Note: there may be exceptions, but I couldn't find any. If any such examples exist, they are likely rare) If a judge refuses to hand out an appropriate sentence by these laws, there are options available. The two main choices are by review, and by appeal. The review board has a few options. They can accept the lower sentence, they can reject the sentence to have the judge resentence, or they can assign the sentencing to a different judge. By way of appeal, the prosecutors can choose to appeal to a higher court. Eventually, either the sentence will become fixed at the reduced level, or it will be corrected by someone else in the system, if not the judge, then either an associate or superior. Either way, the odds are stacked against a rebel judge. However, at least one documented example of this exists, the story of Judge John Coughenour (linked below). He sentenced the same person three times for the same crime, and while he eventually did get a &quot;victory,&quot; the story goes to demonstrate that (a) judges can rebel and get some effect, and (b) even as hard as he fought, he wasn't punished, but he also didn't get nearly the effect he was hoping for, despite a promise from the government to reduce the criminal's sentence in exchange for cooperation. While judges can be censured, reprimanded, removed from office, voted out (at least, at lower levels), and impeached, most of these punishments are reserved for situations of corruption, bribery, etc, rather than simply executing their judiciary discretion, which is one of the core powers granted to them by the judicial branch. Further Reading: One judge makes the case for judgment 18 U.S. Code § 3553 - Imposition of a sentence