Precedent Authority and Validity Table¶
Artifact — instantiates Precedent-Guided Decision Governance
Displays candidate precedents side by side by authority, scope, jurisdiction, current validity, and later treatment.
Retrieval rank, recency, and citation frequency are not legitimacy — and left unmarked, they impersonate it. The Precedent Authority and Validity Table is the flat artifact that strips that impersonation away. It arrays a set of candidate precedents as rows and, across the columns, records the things that actually determine how much each one may weigh: who issued it and at what level, where it binds, its jurisdiction, whether it is still good law or has been narrowed, superseded, or overruled, and whether it was ever precedential at all. Its defining property is that it is a display of standing, not of similarity or of choice — a reader scanning it can see at a glance that the newest, most-cited case in the list is a nonbinding advisory that a later panel already limited, while the older, quieter case above it remains fully authoritative. The table answers "which of these am I even allowed to lean on, and how hard?" before any question of factual fit arises.
Example¶
A securities regulator's enforcement staff is building a case theory and pulls six prior enforcement actions that all reached the outcome they want. Dropped into the authority-and-validity table, the six stop looking interchangeable. Two are Commission-level orders (high authority); three are settled administrative matters with no admission of liability and an explicit nonprecedential legend; one is a Commission order that a court of appeals later vacated in relevant part. The columns make the hierarchy and the lifecycle visible in one view: authority level, whether the action was litigated or settled, jurisdiction, current validity, and the "later treatment" note that flags the vacated order.
The staff's instinct had been to lead with the most recent and factually vivid of the settled matters. The table shows why that would be a mistake — its nonprecedential legend means it carries persuasive color at best — and surfaces the two Commission orders as the real load-bearing authority. Nothing about the facts of the current matter has been analyzed yet; the table has simply told the team which cases are worth analyzing.
How it works¶
The artifact's discipline is entirely in its columns and in the honesty of its status field:
- One row per candidate, fixed authority columns. Issuing body, review level, binding-vs-persuasive weight, and jurisdiction are recorded uniformly so cases can be ranked by standing rather than by how they were found.
- A live validity column. Each row carries a current-treatment status — good, questioned, narrowed, superseded, overruled — so a case that has gone bad cannot sit in the list looking healthy.
- An explicit precedential-status flag. Cases marked nonprecedential, advisory, unpublished, or settled-without-admission are labeled as such, keeping them from borrowing the weight of binding authority.
- Sortable by standing, not by hit rank. The default view orders by authority and validity, deliberately breaking the tool-ranking order in which the cases arrived.
Tuning parameters¶
- Authority-column granularity — how finely the weight ladder is cut (binding/persuasive vs. a multi-rung scale). Finer ladders rank precisely but demand more judgment per row.
- Validity-status vocabulary — how many treatment states the status column distinguishes. Richer vocabularies catch subtle narrowing but raise the cost of keeping every row current.
- Refresh cadence — how often validity columns are re-checked against the corpus. Frequent refreshes prevent stale-good listings but cost maintenance.
- Nonprecedential visibility — whether nonbinding rows are hidden, greyed, or shown with a prominent flag. Hiding declutters; flagging preserves persuasive value without letting it pose as binding.
- Jurisdiction scoping — how strictly out-of-jurisdiction cases are down-weighted versus merely labeled.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is that it defeats two failures cheaply and at a glance: the case that is stale-but-still-cited, and the nonbinding decision that borrows binding weight because it ranked first. By separating standing from salience it enforces the archetype's core sequencing rule — check authority and current validity before analogy. The distinction it makes visible is the everyday one between vertically binding authority and merely persuasive authority.[n1]
Its failure mode is that a table looks authoritative even when its status column is wrong. A validity field that is not kept fresh will list an overruled case as good and lend it a false green light — the artifact's confident layout makes the error more dangerous, not less. It also flattens nuance: a single "authority" cell cannot capture a case that binds on one issue and merely persuades on another. The guarding discipline is to bind the validity column to a live status feed rather than a one-time entry, and to treat the table strictly as a filter on what may weigh, never as a verdict on which case wins — that judgment waits on similarity and treatment.
How it implements the components¶
This artifact fills the standing-and-lifecycle slice of the archetype:
precedent_authority_map— its authority, level, and jurisdiction columns are the map, rendered as a readable ranking of who may create weight and how much.current_validity_and_treatment_status— the validity column records each precedent's live treatment status, keeping bad law visibly bad.nonprecedential_decision_boundary— the precedential-status flag marks which listed decisions were never binding, holding the line against advisory or unpublished cases posing as authority.
It displays standing but performs neither similarity nor propagation. It does not test factual fit (material_fact_similarity_model, held by Material-Fact Comparison Matrix) and does not itself push status changes outward through the corpus (precedent_corpus_and_citation_graph, held by Precedent Citation Graph) — it reads that status into a decision-time view rather than propagating it.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Precedent-Guided Decision Governance — the table is the standing filter that gates which precedents earn further analysis.
- Consumes: Precedent Citation Graph supplies the live treatment status that fills the validity column.
- Sibling mechanisms: Adverse-Precedent Search Protocol · Follow–Distinguish–Overrule Memo · Material-Fact Comparison Matrix · Precedent Case Brief · Precedent Change Notice and Transition Plan · Precedent Conflict Panel · Precedent Consistency Audit
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Representation, Specification & Plan
Rationale: Precedent Authority and Validity Table operates as a static representation, map, specification, schema, or prospective plan that externalizes information because it displays candidate precedents side by side by authority, scope, jurisdiction, current validity, and later treatment.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Precedent Authority and Validity Table as 'Displays candidate precedents side by side by authority, scope, jurisdiction, current validity, and later treatment', so its operative form is Representation, Specification & Plan.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Law & Governance
Origin pattern: Single lineage
Present-day reach: Specialized
Rationale: Comparing authority, jurisdiction, validity, and later treatment is a canonical legal research and citator practice.
Review resolution: Both blind reviewers agree that law governance is the primary origin. Reconciliation resolves encyclopedia synthesis disagreement. Formative alternate lineages are retained as none; later breadth of use is recorded separately as domain_reach=specialized, while origin_mode=single_lineage describes the relationship among origin lineages.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
[n1] Vertical stare decisis binds a lower body to a higher one's rulings; horizontal stare decisis gives a body's own past decisions weight over itself. Persuasive authority — out-of-jurisdiction or nonprecedential cases — may inform but never binds. The authority column encodes exactly this ladder. ↩