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A precedent is ... or a brief description of one of the most important sources of law

In a general scientific and universal sense, a precedent is something that precedes the event being analyzed, which served as the basis for its evaluation. This term is used in many areas of knowledge and daily life of a person, however, most often when it is used, a legal precedent is recalled.

The very term precedent (the meaning of the word in translation from Latin - "preceding") in the legal sense appeared in ancient Rome. However, only in the XVIII - XIX centuries., In the era of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, it became widely used in legal practice.

The modern legal dictionary gives the following interpretation: a precedent is a previously adopted court decision on a particular case, which becomes the basis for resolving other similar cases.

From this definition, we can conclude that the precedent is, first of all, a law-making act, the main subject of which is the judge. At the same time, the scope of judicial lawmaking is much narrower than that of parliamentary lawmaking. So, for a judge, the precedent is not the main, but a by-product of its activities, which is developed exclusively within the legal field that already exists in a particular country.

The need for a legal precedent is explained by the fact that legal norms are quite general in nature, therefore, so-called "gaps in legislation" inevitably arise. It is they who should be filled by acts of judicial lawmaking, which eventually take their place in the legal system of the country.

When analyzing the main sources of law , a clear distinction should be drawn between the concepts of "legal precedent" and "legal practice". A precedent is, first of all, a concrete decision, while legal practice is a whole series of similar judicial decisions that are taken within a long judicial proceeding.

At the same time, it should be emphasized that far from all countries the legal precedent is a source of law in the full sense of the word. Naturally, it plays a significant role in the states of the Anglo-Saxon legal institute (Great Britain, South Africa, the United States, Canada, India), whose legal systems were largely created on the basis of case law. In addition, there are states in which the significance of the precedent increases with time: France, Liechtenstein, Germany, Spain, Latin America. In Russia, this source of law is not recognized on an official level, although certain shifts in recent years are also found here.

A classic example of a state with a developed case law is the United Kingdom. However, even here the range of courts that can make decisions, subsequently mandatory for all, is very seriously limited. These include only the High Court, the High Court of Justice and the House of Lords. Moreover, the courts in the future use not the decisions entirely, but only their specific element - the so-called "essence of the decision", which is a provision of law applicable to those issues that have arisen in connection with the facts established by the court.

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