Book excerpt: Excerpt from Handbook on the Law of Judicial Precedents, or the Science of Case Law Agreeably to this plan and purpose, the work has been made to include an extended consideration of the nature and authority of judicial precedents; their place in compar ative jurisprudence and in equity; the rules which govern the interpretation of judicial decisions and opinions; the processes of analogical argument and of combining cases; the various and complicated considerations which may ai feet the force and value of a non-obligatory precedent; the nature of dicta and the method of their detection and the reasons for their want of authority; the general doctrine of stare decisis, with its special applications to cases of con stitutional and statutory construction, to those judgments which have become rules of property and to the law of the case; the authority of precedents as between various courts of the same state and as between the several courts of the federal system; the use of precedents from other states and foreign countries, with the various causes which may affect their rank in the scale of authority, the reasons for approving them or for criticising them, and the under lying principles which induce the courts to follow the bet ter reason or the general current of authority; the ci fect of the decisions of the United States courts as author ities in the courts of the states; the great and difficult sub j ect of the cases in which the federal courts are constrained to accept and follow the decisions of the state courts and those in which they hold themselves free to form an inde pendent judgment; and finally, the effect of the reversal or overruling of previous judicial decisions. Also, as among the fundamentals of the subject, it has been necessary to consider (in the first chapter) the rules for the solution of novel questions or cases of first impression, and the proper attitude of the courts in the face of precedents which are challenged as obsolete or as locally inapplicable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.