Binding precedent is unconstitutional

It should be understood that binding precedent is not authorized or required by the Constitution, and indeed may be inconsistent with it being the supreme law. It is entirely prudential, for convenience of the court, and "public policy", not law.

From Wapedia :

3. 1. 3. Formulation of federal precedent 

Unlike the states, there is no plenary reception statute at the federal level that continued the common law and thereby granted federal courts the power to formulate legal precedent like their English predecessors. Federal courts are solely creatures of the federal Constitution and the federal Judiciary Acts. [37] However, it is universally accepted that the Founding Fathers of the United States, by vesting "judicial power" into the Supreme Court and the inferior federal courts in Article Three of the United States Constitution, thereby vested in them the implied judicial power of common law courts to formulate persuasive precedent; this power was widely accepted, understood, and recognized by the Founding Fathers at the time the Constitution was ratified. [38] Several legal scholars have argued that the federal judicial power to decide "cases or controversies" necessarily includes the power to decide the precedential effect of those cases and controversies. [39]

The difficult question is whether federal judicial power extends to formulating binding precedent through strict adherence to the rule of stare decisis. This is where the act of deciding a case becomes a limited form of lawmaking in itself, in that an appellate court's rulings will thereby bind itself and lower courts in future cases (and therefore also impliedly binds all persons within the court's jurisdiction). Prior to a major change to federal court rules in 2007, about one-fifth of federal appellate cases were published and thereby became binding precedents, while the rest were unpublished and bound only the parties to each case. [38]

As Judge Alex Kozinski has explained, binding precedent as we know it today simply did not exist at the time the Constitution was framed. [38] Judicial decisions were not consistently, accurately, and faithfully reported on both sides of the Atlantic (reporters often simply rewrote or failed to publish decisions which they disliked), and the United Kingdom lacked a coherent court hierarchy prior to the end of the 19th century. [38] Furthermore, English judges in the eighteenth century subscribed to now-obsolete natural law theories of law, by which law was believed to have an existence independent of what individual judges said. They saw themselves as merely declaring the law which had always theoretically existed, not making it. [38] Therefore, a judge could reject another judge's opinion as simply an incorrect statement of the law, like how scientists regularly reject each other's conclusions as incorrect statements of the laws of science. [38]

The contemporary rule of binding precedent became possible in the U.S. in the nineteenth century only after the creation of a clear court hierarchy (under the Judiciary Acts), and the beginning of regular verbatim publication of U.S. appellate decisions by West Publishing. [38] It gradually developed case-by-case as an extension of the judiciary's public policy of effective judicial administration (that is, in order to efficiently exercise the judicial power). [38] It is generally justified today as a matter of public policy, first, as a matter of fundamental fairness, and second, that in the absence of case law, it would be completely unworkable for every minor issue in every legal case to be briefed, argued, and decided from first principles (such as relevant statutes, constitutional provisions, and underlying public policies), which in turn would create hopeless inefficiency, instability, and unpredictability, and thereby undermine the rule of law. [40] [41]

---

[38] Hart v. Massanari, 266 F.3d 1155 (9th Cir. 2001), citing Anastasoff v. United States, 223 F.3d 898, vacated as moot on reh'g en banc, 235 F.3d 1054 (8th Cir. 2000). http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1480431.html

[39] Michael J. Gerhardt, The Power of Precedent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 59.

[40] Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Judgment Calls: Principle and Politics in Constitutional Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 70-71.

[41] Frederick Schauer, Precedent, 39 Stan. L. Rev. 571, 595-602 (1987).

---

Also see How stare decisis Subverts the Law, especially the law review articles linked from it.