The contributions to this volume address, from a variety of perspectives, the topic of the United States Supreme Court’s faithfulness, or lack thereof, to its own prior decisions. That topic is perennially a “hot” one in American law and legal academia, and periodically in American politics as well. It is inevitable that whenever a new prospective Justice is nominated to serve on the Court, he or she will be grilled extensively by senators about his or her views on stare decisis. 1 This sometimes-obsessive American focus on stare decisis owes much to the Court’s controversial 1973 decision Roe v. Wade , 2 which recognized a constitutional right to abortion and, in so doing, triggered a political and legal reaction that continues to this day. At least since Ronald Reagan in 1980, Republican presidential candidates routinely have pledged, overtly or obliquely, to appoint Justices who will vote to overturn Roe , while their Democratic counterparts have promised to nominate Justices who will uphold that decision. Requirements of judicial ethics prohibit judges from announcing ahead of time how they are likely to rule in some future case, so questioning in Court nomination hearings often employs the general issue of stare decisis as a proxy for the specifi c question of whether the nominee will vote to affi rm or to overrule Roe (and other politically progressive Court decisions from the 1960s and 1970s).