Precedent

Schauer, F. (1987). Precedent. Stanford Law Review, 39(3), 571-605.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1987

Volume

39

Issue

3

Pages

571-605

DOI

10.2307/1228760

DOI registrant

JSTOR

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/1228760

Cited from

law_governance

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Precedent (Stare Decisis)
  • Precedent produces three concurrent goods: predictability (parties can anticipate outcomes), consistency (like cases treated alike across time and decision-makers), and decisional efficiency (past reasoning is reused rather than redeveloped) — values Schauer (1987) systematically defends as the core justifications for precedential constraint.

Domain-specific

• Circular Reasoning
  • . Legal reasoning — a doctrine bootstrapped through a chain of decisions each citing the others, or a precedent invoked to ground the very rule under which it was decided

    This sourceThe self-grounding structure of precedential authority, where the rule that makes a prior case relevant is not supplied by that case.

Mechanisms

• Precedent Analysis
  • This is the everyday form of stare decisis and its escape hatch, distinguishing — following the past unless a relevant difference is shown.

    This sourceExplains precedent as a constraint to follow earlier decisions unless a relevant difference makes the present case dissimilar.

• Precedent and Rationale Repository
  • This is path dependence used deliberately — the stabilizing kind.

    This sourceExplains that precedent is justified in part by the stability and predictability it creates.

• Precedent Index
  • Its failure mode is overfitting to precedent — treating a stored resolution as universally valid and reasoning by superficial resemblance past the point where the facts or the law have moved.

    This sourceExplains that broad precedent categories can suppress important factual differences and constrain adaptation to a changing future.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 5 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/1228760 ×1

Registry ID ref:09deddfd55ad · see in the full table