The Law of Judicial Precedent is the first hornbook-style treatise on the doctrine of precedent in more than a century. It is the product of 13 distinguished coauthors, 12 of whom are appellate judges whose professional work requires them to deal with precedents daily. Together with their editor and coauthor, Bryan A. Garner, the judges have thoroughly researched and explored the many intricacies of the doctrine as it guides the work of American lawyers and judges. The treatise is organized into nine major topics, comprising 93 blackletter sections that elucidate all the major doctrines relating to how past decisions guide future ones in our common-law system. The authors' goal was to make the book theoretically sound, historically illuminating, and relentlessly practical. The breadth and depth of research involved in producing the book will be immediately apparent to anyone who browses its pages and glances over the footnotes: it would have been all but impossible for any single author to canvass the literature so comprehensively and then distill the concepts so cohesively into a single authoritative volume. More than 2,500 illustrative cases discussed or cited in the text illuminate the points covered in each section and demonstrate the law's development over several centuries. The cases are explained in a clear, commonsense way, making the book accessible to anyone seeking to understand the role of precedents in American law. Never before have so many eminent coauthors produced a single lawbook without signed sections, but instead writing with a single voice. Whether you are a judge, a lawyer, a law student, or even a nonlawyer curious about how our legal system works, you're sure to find enlightening, helpful, and sometimes surprising insights into our system of justice.

This book analyzes the theoretical nuances and practical implications of how judges use precedent.

Marc Jacob analyses in depth the most important justificatory and decision-making tool of one of the world's most powerful courts.

It has been said that precedent is the life blood of legal systems. Certainly, an understanding of precedent is vital to an understanding of the workings of law. The principle that decisions should follow those of past similar cases seems simple enough, yet it turns out to be beset with difficulties. What is the justification for following precedents? Do we want absolute, unswerving following of past decisions or a weaker implementation that allows for limited departures? What social and theoretical forces wrought changes in the doctrine? Are judicial pronouncements on precedent rules or just conventions? How do we identify the ratio decidendi of a case? What are the means by which a general "projectable" conclusion may be elicited from a particular judgment? These are some of the problems addressed by contributors to this volume.

In 2007 the International Association of Constitutional Law established an Interest Group on 'The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges' to conduct a survey of the use of foreign precedents by Supreme and Constitutional Courts in deciding constitutional cases. Its purpose was to determine - through empirical analysis employing both quantitative and qualitative indicators - the extent to which foreign case law is cited. The survey aimed to test the reliability of studies describing and reporting instances of transjudicial communication between Courts. The research also provides useful insights into the extent to which a progressive constitutional convergence may be taking place between common law and civil law traditions. The present work includes studies by scholars from African, American, Asian, European, Latin American and Oceania countries, representing jurisdictions belonging to both common law and civil law traditions, and countries employing both centralised and decentralised systems of judicial review. The results, published here for the first time, give us the best evidence yet of the existence and limits of a transnational constitutional communication between courts.

This fourth edition of Precedent in English Law presents a basic guide to the current doctrine of precedent in England, set in the wider context of the jurisprudential problems which any treatment of this topic involves. Such problems include the nature of _ratio_ _decidendi_ of a precedent and of its binding force, the significance of precedents alongside other sources of law, their role in legal reasoning, and the account which must be taken of them by any general theory of law. Considerable re-writing has been undertaken to update case-law and take account of the possible implications for the doctrine of precedent of the impact of European Community law, making it an indispensable work of reference for readers interested in the past history, present state, and future developments of English rules of precedent.

Common Precedents maintains that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change. Reading major novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, this analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in the nineteenth-century as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values, and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous society. An in-depth analysis of Victorian law reports argues that precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. The binding force of precedent, which ties judges to decisions made by their predecessors, also functions as the binding element of an always shifting commonality, pulling it together in the face of rupture and dispersion. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, the form of legal precedent became material. It was vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture. But the impact of precedent extended beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large, and especially to its fiction. Ben-Yishai's monograph argues that understanding the structure of precedent also explains fictional form: how fictionality works, its epistemology, and the ways in which its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of the forms of precedent and an intricate study of the formation of social convention.