Unsettled Overnight

What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed.  Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.

-- Benjamin Cardozo (1870 - 1938), long-time Justice of the Court of Appeals of New York; he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1932, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)