Law
Precedent as a Form of Memory
Common law systems remember by deciding. That makes the archive of decisions something more than a record.
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A legal system that binds itself to its earlier decisions is doing something unusual: it is treating its own past as a source of reasons, not merely as a record of what happened.
Two ways to read a line of cases
One reading treats precedent as constraint — the court is stopped from doing what it might otherwise prefer. The other treats it as accumulated knowledge, on the view that many judges over many years have seen more than any one of them could.
These readings pull apart in the hard cases, which is exactly where the doctrine is asked to do its work.