Book section : Chapter

This chapter presents a social model of precedent, one in which the legal rules of precedent are supplemented by non-legal rules generated within social groups, principally the legal community of which the judge is a part. It argues that the legal structures of precedent are not enough, in themselves, to explain how the practice operates and, in particular, how it is that judges come to experience precedent as coercive. Precedent should be understood as a social practice, a mode of argument...