Considering Lord Bridges statement and other relevant case law discuss whether lower courts should be bound by an erroneous decision of the supreme court until the latter has had the opportunity to correct the mistake when a similar case returns to it.

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Nicky Fathi

The Practice Statement is an effective abandonment of our pretension to infallibility. If a serious error embodied in a decision of this House has distorted the  law, the sooner it is corrected the better.

Considering Lord Bridges statement and other relevant case law discuss whether lower courts should be bound by an erroneous decision of the supreme court until the latter has had the opportunity to correct the mistake when a similar case returns to it.

Until the 1996 Practice Statement (a statement made by Lord Gardiner, L.C. on behalf of himself and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary), the House of Lords regarded itself as bound by any previous decisions and rulings based on the Stare decisis doctrine (stand by what has been decided). This practise was regarded as creating inflexibility and rigidity, suppressing and restricting the development of law, which inevitably may have led to bias. The House of Lords would now treat its decisions as normally binding but would depart from these when it appeared right to do so.

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Lord Bridges' declaration is a testament to the Practice Statement, in which he recognises that it is essential for one to avoid precedence if this means using a different method of differentiating and determining an error which may lead to injustice. An example in which the House of Lords used the Practice Statement in which it overruled a decision it made twelve months before was in the Anderton v Ryan (1985) case. Although Ryan had admitted the handling of what she thought to be a stolen video recorder (even though it was not), she was held to be not ...

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