A lot of the conversation in this thread is "cargo cult justice." The rituals of justice are being performed, but justice isn't to be found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
> In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
You don't get democracy for participating in a voting ritual. You don't get justice for just following precedent. These things are a summation of the beliefs, norms, and actions of a society as a whole.
It is myopic to frame the conversation around precedence or individual cases. When you frame the conversation around justice, it becomes clear why it's OK to break precedence to protect rights granted by nature, but not OK to break precedence to enrich some business that pollutes the environment.
Here is one of our great founding father's (Thomas Paine) take on justice:
> Man, with respect to all those matters, is more a creature of consistency than he is aware, or than governments would wish him to believe. All the great laws of society are laws of nature. Those of trade and commerce, whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals or of nations, are laws of mutual and reciprocal interest. They are followed and obeyed, because it is the interest of the parties so to do, and not on account of any formal laws their governments may impose or interpose.
> But how often is the natural propensity to society disturbed or destroyed by the operations of government! When the latter, instead of being ingrafted on the principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself, and acts by partialities of favour and oppression, it becomes the cause of the mischiefs it ought to prevent.
Our government was acting on behalf of the citizens with brown and obergafell and is acting on behalf of corrupt individuals with citizens united, this, the overturns, or any other number of things our federalist society junta is doing.
So when the court operates on behalf of the weak and oppressed it is fulfilling it's purpose, but when it operates on behalf of the powerful and corrupt, it is denigrating the institution it claims to be and spitting in the very face of justice and crushing the idea of rule of law.