>>530751
>>530798
While modern legal systems have been kiked to hell and back, the idea of precedent is a good one, I think. It stems from the old idea that law wasn't something man-made, but something that was discovered. Right and wrong are supposed to exist independently of the courtroom, and the judge is only supposed to be a respected and level-headed member of the community who can look at the facts (as best as they can be determined) and figure out who was the aggressor, who was the victim, what was justified, what was unjustified, what harm was done, is compensation owed, etc., based on the moral standards that already exist in society.
Precedent only becomes corrupted when the people in charge get the bright idea to start creating laws on their own. Then you get the Average Joe being shat on in court after unknowingly breaking some arbitrary taken-out-of-context by-law or regulation, with no hope of defending himself because some poor sod already got charged for the same thing a few decades earlier but couldn't afford a good enough lawyer, so now every case similar is weighted in favour of the other party because there's a precedent.
Legal positivism has transformed the concept of precedent from something that makes the law fairer and faster over time, into something that just causes our legal systems to bloat and calcify, and strengthens the positions of the amoral sociopaths who leech off us, making them more powerful and more untouchable as time goes by.