Higby v. Mahoney

Recognizing, as Chief Judge Breitel put it in his eloquent exegesis on stare decisis in People v Hobson (39 NY2d 479, 491) that "the accident of a change in personalities in the Judges of a court is a shallow basis for jurisprudential evolution”, I would concur on constraint of the precedents on which the majority rely were it not that there are, in my view, strong reasons grounded in considerations of both stare decisis and statutory construction for not doing so.

The essence of stare decisis is the value of stability in the law so that those who are governed by it may act in reliance upon…