The paper argues that stare decisis, understood as the legal enforceability of judicial precedent to set and resolve a dispute in Colombia, was established through internal and external battles fought by the Constitutional Court to enforce its decisions and the effects thereof. In the course of these clashes with other legal-political actors, the Court privileged a development of a more conceptual than casuistic hermeneutic for understanding the precedent. This conception penetrated the political sphere and became a law as a tool of judicial decongestion, ratifying the constitutional precedent as a mandatory source of law and extending the scope of precedent’s legal enforceability to the jurisprudence of the other high courts.