Abstract Drawing mainly from the common law tradition, article identifies notion and normative value of precedent, summarizes its historical development, distinguishes between application in fields case law, constitutional statutory legislation. It then ponders pros cons precedent-based adjudication institutional ethical requisites for application. finally considers recent phenomena arbitration...

Why do policy-motivated justices conform to unfavorable precedents? This article suggests that two theories, social-legal backgrounds and precedential characteristics, help explain why justices support unfavorable precedents. To test the explanatory power of these theories, the article uses data from the 1953-94 terms that ascertains whether justices cast precedential votes. The results, after ...

We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984) we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2) binding precedent, and (3) pre-dispute bargaining done in the “shadow” of precedent-setting courts. The pre-dispute bargaining creates an endog...

Abstract Every legal case sets a precedent by developing the law in one of following two ways. It either expands its scope, which it positive precedent, or narrows it, negative precedent. Legal outcome prediction, prediction outcome, is an increasingly popular task AI. In contrast, we turn our focus to outcomes here, and introduce new prediction. We discover asymmetry existing models’ ability p...