When Precedents Clash

TL;DR

This paper enhances legal case-based reasoning models by integrating hierarchical court structures and temporal relations to better handle conflicting precedents and formalize concepts like overruling and per incuriam cases.

Contribution

It introduces an enriched classifier model incorporating court hierarchy and temporal aspects, enabling clearer decision-making amidst conflicting precedents in common law systems.

Findings

Formalization of overruled and per incuriam cases within the model

Conditions for unambiguous decision-making in conflicting precedents

Integration of hierarchical and temporal information improves legal reasoning

Abstract

Consistency of case bases is a way to avoid the problem of retrieving conflicting constraining precedents for new cases to be decided. However, in legal practice the consistency requirements for case bases may not be satisfied. As pointed out in (Broughton 2019), a model of precedential constraint should take into account the hierarchical structure of the specific legal system under consideration and the temporal dimension of cases. This article continues the research initiated in (Liu et al. 2022; Di Florio et al. 2023), which established a connection between Boolean classifiers and legal case-based reasoning. On this basis, we enrich the classifier models with an organisational structure that takes into account both the hierarchy of courts and which courts issue decisions that are binding/constraining on subsequent cases. We focus on common law systems. We also introduce a temporal relation between cases. Within this enriched framework, we can formalise the notions of overruled cases and cases decided per incuriam: such cases are not to be considered binding on later cases. Finally, we show under which condition principles based on the hierarchical structure and on the temporal dimension can provide an unambiguous decision-making process for new cases in the presence of conflicting binding precedents.