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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 21 2012 @ 06:28 PM EDT |
Wikipedia:Case
law is the set of existing rulings which made new interpretations of law and,
therefore, can be cited as precedents. In some countries, such as the USA, the
term is exclusively used for judicial decisions of selected appellate courts,
courts of first instance, and other bodies discharging judicial
functions. District courts are courts of first instance and they
do make precedence. It's a weaker precedence than you get from an appeals
court, but it's still precedence.
The parent said:"trial
court decisions, while they may be persuasive, are not binding authority in
future cases"
Yes, but if they are persuasive, it's because they
set precedent. Precedence is just a matter of trying to be consistent by doing
things they way they have been done before.
Not all precedence is created
equal. There is a pecking order. Logically, if a decision is overturned by a
higher court, any precedential value in the lower court's decision is wiped out.
The higher court's decision is what matters from then on. Beyond that, the value
of precedence of a higher court outweighs the value from a lower court's
decision. Most lower court cases involve things that have decided so many times
before that the resulting precedential value is nil, but doesn't mean it can't
be significant in very rare situations.
Also, precedence is not as
black and white of an issue as you are making it out to be. If it were, the US
Supreme Court could never change its mind about anything. Since it has been
known to do so, obviously there is no such thing as absolutely binding
precedence.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 21 2012 @ 06:44 PM EDT |
Parent<blockquote>Which, aside from reviving the patent issues and getting
the case into a potentially-friendly court, may be a reason for Oracle to try to
get the case into the Federal Circuit, as a Ninth Circuit decision upholding the
District Court on the API copyright issue would be binding precedent throughout
the Ninth Circuit, while a Federal Circuit decision that upheld the District
Court on that issue wouldn't be binding in the Ninth Circuit or anywhere else
(well, I think it would if the issue arose later in the Court of International
Trade, which I think is the only Article III Court that is under the Federal
Circuit entirely rather than having the special subject-matter based appeal
route, but that's not as big of a deal as a binding decision in one the
geographic circuits.) </blockquote>
An ever better reason is that the Federal Circuit is the only place it could
possibly be appealed to. The Ninth Circuit doesn't have jurisdiction, as has
already been explained, and it would be a bit ridiculous to try to go directly
to the US Supreme Court.<br><br>BTW, your logic is a bit silly. If
something provides the only relevant precedence, why wouldn't courts think they
should follow that precedence?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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