Case law

In common law countries (including the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Ireland, India, Pakistan, Bangladeshi, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Israel and Hong Kong), it is used for judicial decisions of selected appellate courts, courts of first instance, agency tribunals, and other bodies discharging adjudicatory functions.

Normally, the burden rests with litigants to appeal rulings (including those in clear violation of established case law) to the higher courts.

If the court believes that developments or trends in legal reasoning render the precedent unhelpful, and wishes to evade it and help the law evolve, it may either hold that the precedent is inconsistent with subsequent authority, or that it should be distinguished by some material difference between the facts of the cases; some jurisdictions allow for a judge to recommend that an appeal be carried out.

By contrast, decisions in civil law jurisdictions are generally shorter, referring only to statutes.

[4] The reason for this difference is that these civil law jurisdictions adhere to a tradition that the reader should be able to deduce the logic from the decision and the statutes.

Historically, common law courts relied little on legal scholarship; thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, it was very rare to see an academic writer quoted in a legal decision (except perhaps for the academic writings of prominent judges such as Coke and Blackstone).

Today academic writers are often cited in legal argument and decisions as persuasive authority; often, they are cited when judges are attempting to implement reasoning that other courts have not yet adopted, or when the judge believes the academic's restatement of the law is more compelling than can be found in case law.

In federal or multi-jurisdictional law systems there may exist conflicts between the various lower appellate courts.

Sometimes these differences may not be resolved, and it may be necessary to distinguish how the law is applied in one district, province, division or appellate department.

Any court may seek to distinguish the present case from that of a binding precedent, to reach a different conclusion.