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 anthropology and jurisprudence may have in common-vagrant erudition and a fantastical air-they have in common the artisan task of seeing broad principles in parochial form.