Precedent Revisited: Carter v Canada (AG) and the Contemporary Practice of Precedent

The Practice of Precedent: Anastasoff, Noncitation Rules, and the Meaning of Precedent in an Interpretive Community

Like sailing, gardening, politics, and poetry, law and ethnography are crafts of place: they work by the light of local knowledge. The instant case, Palsgraff or the Charles River Bridge, provides for law not only the ground from which reflection departs but also the object towards which it tends, and for ethnography, the settled practice, potlatch, or couvade, does the same. Whatever else anth...

Precedent in the Making

Unit precedent

Schall v. Martin and the Transformation of Judicial Precedent

Informative Precedent and Intrajudicial Communication

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that...