What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use. The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail, so de facto isn't "bound by precedent" -- he rules in favor of the side he's inclined to support. (Posner was briefly derided for laying this bare.)
It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 1.5TB) just about any litigant can find case law to support almost any position. You end up with a system that's much like the Civil Law, but with the added burden of "research."
Yes. Then you figure out in what respects the current case resembles the precedent and which is more unique. There are not twenty cases where the facts and circumstances are identical to the present one because that’s not how reality works.
> Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
Literally the lawyers’ jobs to do this.
I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
Sure, but we're talking about an adversarial system where the lawyers are necessarily at-odds with each other, so they research the issue each from their own perspective. Then the one side will present the judge (in motions, etc.) with "here are ten cases that support our position, we've researched them exhaustively," and the other side goes, "no, no, those are distinguishable because X, here are ten cases that support OUR position, we've researched them extensively," -- and the judge and his clerks, so busy that it takes them two months to respond to any motion or communication, often just go with their guts and justify their decision post hoc.
> I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
lol, dude, it's a mess right now. If society cared at all about justice, and especially about access to justice, the current system would undergo absolute root-and-branch overhaul.
They research the other side’s citations, too.