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Exploring the Impact of Legal Precedents on Contemporary Jurisprudence

1. Introduction to Legal Precedents and Their Significance

During the last few decades, countless examples of algorithms and technologies with the potential to support and even replicate judicial activity have been developed. Most of these tools are based on machine learning techniques, particularly on the analysis of language. Significant efforts have been put into developing these tools, which can be applied to various stages of case and legal assessment (e.g. summarization, classification, translation), offering benefits, primarily in terms of time and labor. The opportunity costs for courts and other legal professionals of using these techniques are relatively low with regards to ROI and learning curve, finally affecting the balance between judicial independence and effectiveness. Most significantly, the generation and verification of legal arguments would harness algorithms. As such, the legal reasoning process could eventually have a higher precision, be more rigorous, less random and subjective, and theoretically present lower legal total costs, due to fewer appeals or judicial revisions by higher courts.

The deployment of algorithms in legal decisions opens up a variety of societal discussions, largely distinct from the methodological and technical domains. Despite the great potential of such tools, the environments in which they will operate are particularly complex, characterized by informal institutions and rules, traditions, and cultures. Specializations, rhetorical ability, and constant use of linguistic expression – particularly of legalese and jurisprudential concepts – also define and legitimize the legal field and invite interpretation and language-level capabilities which are not, as yet, within the reach of the available tools. Our explanation of how jurisprudence through legal precedents may foster the performance of computational linguistic algorithms as an ingredient of the judicial decision-making process marks a link to the legal field using language as the common denominator. The main intuition of legal development stands out. Legal decisions made during court sessions represent legal precedents that become part of a body of court cases as a result of an associative network expressed in legal language.

2. Historical Development of Legal Precedents

The previous section has provided a brief discussion on jurisprudence and legal precedents and explored how contemporary legal systems were relying heavily on legal precedents in producing jurisprudence. This section will provide a more detailed and comprehensive discussion on the historical development of legal precedents in common law systems as an approach to cope with the ever-increasing legal disputes of the rulers before them. Despite the flood of historical accounts that link the rise of such legal devices to a variety of unrelated causes, early lawyers are typically historically credited with such creative problem solving. In chronological order, these theories follow an account concerning Norman judges, a picture suggesting that communal juridical practices based on reciprocity were replaced by the introduction of judges who brought with them supposed legal expertise based on principles that were developed in other contexts. If they are to be taken seriously, the theories must explain nuances in their portrayal of judges as problem solvers.

There are a multitude of historical accounts that attempt to provide a chronological understanding of how and, more importantly, why judges started to cope with the increasing number of disputes in competition with the contested sources of communal law. The theory assigns a preeminent role to early Norman lords as important engines of proto-state formation and more established state formation projects. It has judges and legal experts as clearly identified agents who were commissioned to work on situational and informational constraints that arose from the nature of this lordly circle, which demanded problem solvers to process a problematic workload. They developed expertise in the special conditions required by the prevention and absence of delegated personal and not shared constraints, and they used their expertise in order to voluntaristically and surgically constrain most contentious practices. The theory explains how proto-state organizations form, develop, and persist despite the fact that they do not form as states while others, vested with similar personal responsibilities and peer pressure, must submit or retire.

3. Case Studies: Analyzing Key Legal Precedents

The first case study addressed a topic that has been largely neglected in the contemporary property literature, namely the role of the King as a party to litigation. Samuel de Ricci’s extremely useful Set of Fourteenth-century Assizes (LRS 92), a collection of over one hundred assizes heard across England, was the inspiration for the project as a whole. In every assize, the King was explicitly named (through his justices), the assize itself had been granted by charter, and the financial aspects of the dispute were given explicit consideration. A resource which enables shallow, contrasting entries to be made for a large number of disputes is unusual, and the richness of excavation records from the period is surprisingly limited. These particular facts were critical because they were especially relevant to the relationships between the King and his subjects as manifest through the courts, which was the paper’s primary purpose. How far was the medieval King perceived as a financial or political supporter (and by whom), what were the main political issues at stake (if any), and how did host-community dynamics shape assize processes and outcomes?

The men who appealed to the courts had a vested interest in the issues to be decided through the assize process. At its simplest, this was the vision of the King as the ultimate object of fealty and the peace-bringer who would direct society towards a desired end: in a world where the alternative to regular payments of taxes and revenues was anarchy, divine retribution, and social disruption, the King was a valuable and indeed often culturally necessary figure. Without him, there would be no defense, no justice, and no ordered society. In fourteenth-century medieval England, the King wore the crown, exercised royal power through his justices and royal administration, and controlled the public purse. In the courts, these issues translated into rote references to the King’s peace, sometimes linked to religious or moral concerns and sometimes to the exigency of royal protection. Widows, for example, often appeared in the capacity of defenders of the King’s peace. The unvoiced proposition, in these instances, was that the King’s peace was valuable and therefore paid for. In the assizes, the logic was more syllogistic than syllogism: protection against private malfeasance was seen as worth paying for.

4. The Role of Legal Precedents in Shaping Modern Jurisprudence

I. The growing number of court cases has made legal precedents an important factor in influencing the decisions of subsequent cases. The search for legal truth is not confined to an argument, or a chaos of arguments between the advocates. The task of a judge involves two somewhat different activities. On the one hand, he or she must explore the world of the law, and, if we consider the activity at its purest and best, search out the law that is already there. We call this the discovery-oriented dimension of judging.

II. The role of precedents is, as everyone knows, substantial in civil law countries. The substantiality of preceding caselaw usually differs from field to field, however, and the function of it is often one of moderation. It is considered that creative decisions that produce significant innovations must be made by the legislature or by the legal scholars rather than by the courts. The consequence is that, in principle, judgments lower in the hierarchy and similar in their factual conditions can more or less compel a judge through the consistency principle, while higher court pronouncements or older cases dictate the judge to act in an analogous way. This conservatism of the legal ideal implies that a systematic examination of relevant precedents can deliver insight. The analogy as an argument is judged to have merit when the recourse has shown that another judge in a similar case has found some factually similar case to be instances of a specified legal class.

5. Challenges and Future Directions in the Application of Legal Precedents

Research into the impact of legal precedents on present-day jurisprudence is still in its infancy. The reasons for this are that (a) the legal systems differ considerably, and (b) the implementation of precedent systems is often obscure and frequently not transparent. At the same time, if legal precedents did not serve as a reasonable guide to jurisprudence and decision-making, this would fundamentally challenge the judicial institution. If legal precedents and jurisprudence were really disconnected, important features of actual court practice, such as why courts still discuss and justify decisions despite there being an array of theories posing negative answers to this question, or why citation practice and the assignment of precedential quality differ across court systems, would need alternative explanations.

Physical differences, such as new legislation, changes in average cases, changes in juridical practice, or changing technologies, diseases, or economies, are inherent parts of any society. It is plausible to assume that the sheer passage of time introduces some novelty into case law and that such differences have an impact on the value the precedent has to contemporary decision making. New precedents effectively replace old precedents, but which ones? To the extent that citations serve as part of the mechanism to weed out obsolete precedents, what drives this and makes certain old precedents more attractive than others? Moreover, new precedents are likely to be more generally available, better understood, and, when necessary, commented and assigned formal status.

The quantity and quality of relevant jurisprudence are not a priori given and can plausibly raise serious concerns. The case distribution underpinning the coexistence of the old and new cases might have changed, which hinders designing a healthy window across which to perform joint estimation. Moreover, the aging of judicial experience is likely to vary dramatically depending on the issue. That is, the share of cases previously endorsed or overturned is not only case-specific but also area-specific; there are indeed issue-specific aging properties.