Case Law

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A Case Law is a body of law that consists of written decisions of courts and judges which interpret and create precedents for future legal decisions.



References

2023

2016

  • (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/precedent Retrieved:2016-5-18.
    • In common law legal systems, a precedent or authority is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. Common law legal systems place great value on deciding cases according to consistent principled rules so that similar facts will yield similar and predictable outcomes, and observance of precedent is the mechanism by which that goal is attained. Black's Law Dictionary defines "precedent" as a "rule of law established for the first time by a court for a particular type of case and thereafter referred to in deciding similar cases." [1] Common law precedent is a third kind of law, on equal footing with statutory law (statutes and codes enacted by legislative bodies), and Delegated legislation (in U.K. parlance) or regulatory law (in U.S. parlance) (regulations promulgated by executive branch agencies). Case law or common law is the set of decisions of adjudicatory tribunals that can be cited as precedent. In most countries, including most European countries, the term is applied to any set of rulings on law which is guided by previous rulings, for example, previous decisions of a government agency. Precedential (whether strongly binding or weakly persuasive) case law can arise from a ruling by either a judicial court, or by an executive branch agency. Cases, trials, and hearings that do not result in written decisions, decisions from tribunals that are not in the "chain of command" that binds the later court, written decisions that are designated "nonprecedential" by the tribunal, or written decisions of agencies that are not issued and indexed with sufficient formality to gain precedential effect, do not create binding precedent for future court decisions.
  1. Black's Law Dictionary, p. 1059 (5th ed. 1979).