Precedent expresses a universal human need for predictability, not a common-law peculiarity

Evidence

The doctrine of precedent is not an institution peculiar to our common law. It is in essence a response to the human need in any group for reckonability and predictability of result. Who has not heard a small child say ‘But one time you let me,’ and been thereby forced into meticulous and careful distinction (if that is possible) of the prior case. … The decided law itself has never, even in the short wooden period from about 1880 to 1910, been applied as by a slot machine. The felt drive for the just result, even when hidden below the manipulation of prior cases and statutes, has always been present. The trouble has been that too many of the bar have been fooled by their law school educations into believing that rules, especially as built out of the narrow holdings, are necessarily definitive of the outcome of cases and that argument of the policy involved is somehow nonrespectable and must be done in an undercover or even underhanded manner. … That irreducible minimum would seem to better handled by the courts than by arbitration even though-in the particular the result would have been better decided in arbitration. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 4854

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that policy argument is always present beneath rule manipulation pays off earlier chapter claims about discretion, principle-vs-policy, and ‘plain-meaning’ reading being itself a policy choice. — connects to: Publishing awards forces conformity pressure that distorts case-by-case justice — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 4848; Commerce requires irreducible minimum certainty about legal meaning — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 4856; Absence of unfair surprise never justifies overruling precedent alone — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2563 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Precedent constrains outcomes while analogy merely supports arguments #corroborates (0.80) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 162
• Persuasion by past reasoning is not the same as obeying precedent. #qualifies (0.75) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 66