Can case law never appealed in a higher court be appealed and overturned? I will phrase this question in New Zealand legal terms but I am actually interested in any common law jurisdiction or any jurisdiction with adversarial system. Say there is some case law made in the High Court establishing that certain procedural peculiarity is appropriate (it could be related to whether/how certain class of defendants can be added to proceedings, or fine-grained rules regarding admissibility of evidence etc.). The appropriateness of this procedural peculiarity was first declared by a High Court judge several years ago, and has been cited by High Court judges since then. It has never been challenged in the next level court (Court of Appeal). Does the fact that the procedural peculiarity was not challenged in the Court of Appeal in the first place prevent it from being challenged later in any other case citing it? Can it still be challenged in the next level court despite being long established in the lower court?
Any precedent can be overturned by any court at the same or higher level in the hierarchy So, for your example of a High Court precedent, it can be overturned at Supreme Court, Court of Appeal or High Court levels. However, the longer a precedent is in place, the less likely it is to be overturned because one of the objectives of the legal system is to provide certainty - a system that routinely overturns precedent doesn’t do that. Also, a precedent that is often cited with approval is more compelling because it’s no longer just one judges reading of the law, many other judges agree. Also, the judiciary tends to be conservative in overturning precedent. Most judges see it as their role to interpret law made by the legislature. If the people/legislature think their interpretation is wrong then the judiciary tends to feel that the legislature is the body who should change the law. That said, really old common law precedent that hasn’t been cited for a long while may be readily overturned if it comes up because social expectations may have changed.
I am wondering if the government can still implement it and force people to pay even if the decision is challenged in court. Laws are not automatically put on hold because they are challenged. For an action or a law to be halted by the Court before a decision is made, the applicant would have to seek an interlocutory injunction, which are granted only if, as established in RJR-MacDonald Inc. v. Canada (Attorney General), [1994] 1 SCR 311, (i) is there a serious issue to be tried, (ii) will the party seeking the injunction suffer irreparable harm if it is not granted, and (iii) does the balance of convenience favour the party seeking the injunction. The first issue is rarely a problem, especially for a controversial issue like this. I am thinking the government might be able to tax people and then refund people if the court doesn't uphold the decision instead of a court challenge being able to postpone the tax indefinitely. A quantifiable financial harm is rarely irreparable (in private law cases). However there is an important exception for Charter cases where a financial harm is assumed to be irreparable because damages are often not awarded in constitutional cases. Though in this case it might be considered reparable because the quantification of damage and the method of redress are straightforward. For the third question, the Court needs to weigh both sides' interests in the case where the injunction is granted. Even if the damage is deemed irreparable, the Court may (or may not) still find the public interest in health outweighs the financial interests of the unvaccinated.
Any court from a municipal traffic court on up can declare a law unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court is almost never the court that does so in the first instance. Also, while the jurisdiction stripping law that you suggest might be unconstitutional, it is not obviously unconstitutional. The relevant language is in Article III, Section 2 of the United States Constitution (this has been modified by the 11th Amendment in ways that are not pertinent to the issue at hand): The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;-- to Controversies between two or more States;--between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States;--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects. In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. The key language being the language in bold, who scope and limitations are the subject of hot debate in legal scholarship. For example, both military tribunal law for non-soldiers and the collateral review of death sentences implicate this provision. An issue related to U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction over military court-martial court composition will be heard this year in oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. There is also debate over whether the jurisdiction of every single federal court can be removed from a matter within the judicial power of the United States. In that regard, keep in mind that the United States federal court system did not have direct appeals of criminal convictions at all until the 1890s, although you could challenge, for example, the jurisdiction of a criminal court over your case with a writ of habeas corpus which is a collateral attack on a conviction in a separate civil lawsuit formally directed at your prison warden. That being said, as far as I know, a law is considered in effect until declared unconstitutional. It is illegal to break an unconstitutional law, until declared so. You are wrong. A law that is unconstitutional on its face is, in terms of legal theory, unconstitutional immediately upon enactment and a court simply acknowledges that fact. It is not illegal to break an unconstitutional law even if no court has yet declared it to be unconstitutional (in U.S. jurisprudence). A law that is unconstitutional as applied is unconstitutional in application at the moment it is applied unconstitutionally, and again, a court merely acknowledges that fact.
The general rule is, anything is allowed unless it is forbidden (and not that you can only do things that are expressly permitted). The logical structure of law may be a bit more challenging than procedural programming logic, since it may require a global knowledge and evaluation of the entire code (typically but not absolutely, the scope of the search for "unless otherwise" conditions is restricted to "in this chapter"). In other words, the law is a set of propositions which must all be true, and unlike actual execution of instructions in a sequence, law is to be interpreted simultaneously but hierarchically (that is: the order in which clauses are written is not significant). The appearance that the law is self-contradictory is largely illusory, though the resolution of the conflict may require a careful reading of the law and knowledge of jurisdictional hierarchy (federal law is superior to state law, which entails a particular resolution of the apparent conflict). Sometimes there are real conflicts, which usually result from using words in conflicting ways (note the practice of re-defining words "in this chapter/section/title"). The reason why law is not a science is that law is normative, not descriptive: it dictates what is allowed (a determination made through the political process), and does not attempt to discover what independently is. The reason why the legal process cannot be implemented in software is that software does not yet correctly interpret natural language, and law is written in natural language following interpretations based on judgments of what choices a reasonable would make. Perhaps if you propose a piece of law that you think is contradictory, it would be possible to show how the contradiction is illusory.
The appeals court has found that the county court judge made a decision that was consistent with the evidence that was presented at trial. As such, the decision is sound. It appears that the defendant tried to present additional/different evidence or different arguments about the law in the appeal than they did at trial - this is not permitted. As to responsibility, the defendant and their legal team were responsible for deciding how to run their case and what evidence to present and what arguments to run. What evidence to present and how to present it and what submissions to make on the law is a tactical decision for each party. You can get it wrong. That doesn't let you try again on appeal. If your barrister has been negligent, and that directly caused you to lose, you can sue your barrister. In terms of interpreting a particular paragraph of a judgement, the appeals court may or may not make comment on a particular paragraph but the reasons, while important, are not really subject to interpretation other than that. A judgement will give orders, these should be very precise and not open to interpretation - things like &quot;the defendant will pay X to the plaintiff&quot; or &quot;the case is dismissed&quot; etc.
Defendants cannot switcheroo whenever they want. There are good reasons why this is almost never done. The lawyer in any of these scenarios is violating an ethical duty of candor to the tribunal, if it is done without court permission (which is unlikely to be granted), even if the client suggested or insisted upon the idea. The lawyer would be responsible for his or her client's actions by cooperating in it, rather than calling out his client in open court over the objections of the client to prevent the switcheroo from working, as the lawyer would have an ethical obligation to do. I would not really consider this to be a gray area. The relevant ethical rules and the related official commentaries to them are quite clear, even if they are not absolutely perfectly clear. Those rules create an affirmative duty of an attorney to prevent his or her client from misleading members of a tribunal (either a judge or a jury or both). Cooperating with this scheme could (and likely would) result in professional licensure related sanctions ranging from a private censure to disbarment for the lawyer, just as it did in the linked 1994 case. Also, while a "not guilty" verdict was entered in the 1994 case, the prosecution would have a good chance of success if they demanded that the judge declare a mistrial, and also a good chance of avoiding double jeopardy limitations in this situation, because the mistrial arose from the actions of the defendant trying to bring about the situation. On the other hand, if this trick worked so well that the prosecutors came to the conclusion that their primary witness linking the defendant to the crime was wrong and that the defendant was not actually the person who committed the crime, the prosecutors would have an ethical duty to not attempt to prosecute the individual whom the prosecutors now believed to be factually innocent (the analysis is actually a bit more complex than that, but that is the gist of it). The defendant and the attorney could (and likely would) also each be held in direct, punitive contempt of court by the judge for this conduct, allowing them to be summarily punished by imprisonment or a fine to an extent similar to a misdemeanor violation, on the spot, without a trial other than an opportunity to explain themselves to the judge in a sentence or two each, since it would be conduct in violation of the good order of the court and disrespectful of its rules and decorum conducted in the actual courtroom in the presence of the judge. Each could easily end up spending several months in jail on the spot for that stunt and perhaps a $1,000 fine each, if the judge was sufficiently displeased. There would be a right to appeal this contempt of court sanction, but the contempt of court punishment would almost surely be upheld on appeal in these circumstances. In a case where the criminal defendant faces extremely severe sanctions if found guilty, such as the death penalty or life in prison, and the defense attorney was a self-sacrificing idealist or close family member of the criminal defendant, one could imagine the defense attorney and client deciding that the professional and contempt citation sanctions were worth being punished with, in order to save the life of the criminal defendant, if they also were convinced that this trick would work so well that the prosecutors would be persuaded of the criminal defendant's innocence sufficiently to not insist on retrying the criminal defendant in a new trial. This would be somewhat analogous to an intentional foul in basketball, but with much higher stakes. But, this would be an extraordinarily rare situation in court, because the punishment for this "intentional foul" in the courtroom are much more severe, and because the likelihood of it producing a beneficial result is much smaller. It isn't hard to understand why a successful switcheroo feels morally justified. It prevents a witness whose testimony would have been much less reliable than it actually would have been from being used to convict a criminal defendant who might conceivably be factually innocent. And it might be very hard to discredit the testimony of that witness in any other way in order to prevent a wrongful conviction of the criminal defendant. Eye witness misidentifications are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions, and are especially common in death penalty cases because jurors are "death qualified" making them more pro-prosecution than a typical jury. Preventing innocent people from being convicted of crimes is one of several important values of the criminal justice system, and this is the instinct that probably motivated the dissents in the professional misconduct process in the 1994 case. But, the court system also strongly values candor on the part of attorneys, and likewise values not having the court systems be used to trip up witnesses who may sincerely think that they are telling the truth even if they are mistaken about the accuracy of their testimony, in a deceptive manner. In this situation, the latter candor consideration usually prevails, because the rules prohibiting this kind of conduct and scheme, which admits no "moral justification" or "necessity exception", are quite clear. In the same vein, a prosecuting attorney can be sanctioned (and has been on at least one occasion in Colorado) for not being truthful in communications to third parties, even when the lies are used to peacefully defuse a potentially deadly hostage situation. For attorneys, the duty of candor and truthfulness really knows no exceptions. Cops, in contrast, however, are allowed to lie in many circumstances to secure confessions or stop criminals.
In most places I imagine the issue would go before a probate judge who would attempt to determine the validity of each presented will, and if both were valid, then they would attempt to reconcile the disparities to the best of their ability. Broadly speaking, the process would look like this (I'm using UK law as an example): You die An individual is chosen to handle your affairs (executor or administrator [or possibly both depending on jurisdiction]) They choose a will to go off of (these steps could be reversed if the wills named different administrators, in which case each administrator would file for the grant of representation and consequently involve the probate judge earlier) Someone challenges and suggests using the other will (probably because they feel they're not getting what's theirs) A probate judge is involved The probate judge decides Appeals would be made to Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court That being said, every jurisdiction is different, and this is more of a template answer for English common law (and derivative courts), than an attempt to describe in detail any specific jurisdiction's procedures.
The U.S. Supreme Court, given the discretionary nature of its customary appellate jurisdiction, has adopted the practice of not considering complaints filed with it in its original jurisdiction until leave to do so is granted. As the highest legal authority in the land, there is no other court in which this procedure can be litigated. A complaint filed without leave would either be rejected, or would be deemed a request for leave to file it, and evaluated on that basis. Without the grant of leave to file the complaint, it will not be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court on the merits.