Supreme Court justices, like most people, like to appear to be consistent. No one wants to be thought to be a flip-flopper, an opportunist or a hypocrite. That means justices try not to disavow earlier legal views, even ones that appeared in dissents, in opinions they wrote as appeals court judges, in academic work, at their confirmation hearings and elsewhere. This impulse, which a provocative new article by UVA law professor Richar M. Re, calls “personal precedent,” can be at odds with respect for precedent in the conventional sense.