ABSTRACT
The paper first reconstructs the transformations during the 19th and 20th centuries, by which the codified legal systems of continental Europe were complemented with increasingly thick layers of case law. On this basis, I secondly analyse the nature of precedent in codified legal systems, in which only legislation is formally acknowledged as a source of law. For those analyses, I will employ an abstract notion of textual authority, according to which textual authority consists in social practices, where the legal profession accepts normative texts as ultimate bases of legal argument, without requiring further legal reasons to do so. Such a concept of authority will help to make visible informal elements of case law besides the formal sources of (strictly binding) legislation.
Jansen, Nils, The Oracles of Codification: Informal Authority in Statutory Interpretation in Philosophical Foundations of Precedent, Timothy Endicott, Hafsteinn Dan Kristjánsson and Sebastian Lewis eds, 2023: Oxford University Press, 429-440.
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