Section 11-735

Citation: Section 11-735
Parent Document: Mendes v. Johnson, 389 A.2d 781 (1978)
Jurisdiction: DC (municipal)
Effective Date: 1978-06-13
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2073911/mendes-v-johnson/ ↗

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The question of the retroactive effect to be accorded judicial decisions announcing new rules of law has plagued legal commentators since at least the early eighteenth century. Blackstone emerged in the early nineteenth century as the leading proponent of the "declaratory theory" of the common law which shaped the contours of Anglo-American jurisprudence on this subject until modern times.[17] Fundamental to this theory was the notion of the retroactivity as well as prospectivity of all judicial decisions. According to Blackstone, adjudication consisted of a search for the right or true rules of law. In accordance with the thesis that they had always been the law, new legal rules established by decisions overruling precedent, considered discoveries of the true law of the case, were related back to and declared operative at the time the controversies in the overruling cases themselves, and in other cases pending before the court, arose regardless of the status of the law at their inception. Overruled precedents, denominated failures at discovery of the true law, were deemed, once overturned, to have never existed. Consequently, new rules were not considered really new, but were actually further clarifications of the old thereby maintaining continuity and consistency in the common law. Thus, as discoverers rather than creators of the law, the function of judges was to "find" the true principles of law and to "declare" them as controlling. As indicated above, the rule of retroactivity of overruling decisions stated by Blackstone became firmly implanted in the common law. See Note, Prospective Overruling and Retroactive Application in the Federal Courts, 71 Yale L.J. 907 (1962).

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