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259 points the-mitr | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.222s | source
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sieve ◴[] No.45049013[source]
I don't know why they decided to pause uploads. Relying on Indian courts for sensible and timely judgments will only lead to grief. They do not respect precedence and judgements often depend on the judge and the people involved rather than the facts of the case.

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...

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A_D_E_P_T ◴[] No.45049867[source]
> They do not respect precedence

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.

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troad ◴[] No.45050152[source]
Strong disagree. A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making. Statute law cannot cover every case, and systems that pretend it can end up being hopelessly vague and unclear.

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.

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A_D_E_P_T ◴[] No.45050245[source]
> A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making.

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."

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1. mistrial9 ◴[] No.45053854[source]
no doubt you have seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw, but by simply omitting the context .. what jurisdiction, what burdens are placed upon the parties, what is at stake.. you make a sweeping generalization that is just false, for the sake of persuasion. Speaking authoritatively you have some responsibility to show context, otherwise this is blather IMHO