Until the year 1966, the
House of Lords in the
United Kingdom was bound to follow all of its previous decisions under the principle of
stare decisis, even if this created "injustice" and "unduly restrict(s) the proper development of the law" (
London Tramways Co. v London County Council [1898] AC 375). The
Practice Statement 1966 is authority for the House of Lords to depart from their previous decisions. It does not affect the
precedential value of cases in lower courts; all other courts that recognise the Supreme Court (formerly the House of Lords) as the court of last resort are still bound by Supreme Court (and House of Lords) decisions. Before this, the only way a binding precedent could be avoided was to create new legislation on the matter. A germane example is the case of
Anderton v Ryan (1985) where the House of Lords interpreted the
Criminal Attempts Act 1981 in such a way as to make the Act virtually ineffective. Only one year later in
R v Shivpuri (1986)
Lord Bridge (a member of the erroneous majority in
Anderton) acknowledged the error and said "the Practice Statement is an effective abandonment of our pretension to infallibility. If a serious error embodied in a decision of this House has been distorted by the law, the sooner it is corrected the better". By contrast, in
Knuller v DPP,
Lord Reid, who had previously given a strong
dissenting judgment in
Shaw v DPP, said while he still disagreed with the majority decision in that case, in the interests of certainty
he would not overturn Shaw (even though the Practice Statement had given authority to do so). Suggestions that a rigid adherence to
stare decisis be dropped had been made prior to 1966, initially by
Lord Wright in an article for the
Cambridge Law Journal in 1943, and by
Lord Gardiner and others in the 1963 book,
Law Reform Now. ==Content==