Editing Precedent (section)

===Development===
Early English [[Common law#Disambiguate statute|common law]] did not have or require the ''stare decisis'' doctrine for a range of legal and technological reasons:
* During the formative period of the [[Common law#Disambiguate statute|common law]], the royal courts constituted only one among many fora in which in the English could settle their disputes. The royal courts operated alongside and in competition with ecclesiastic, manorial, urban, mercantile, and local courts.
* Royal courts were not organised into a hierarchy; instead, different royal courts (exchequer, common pleas, king's bench, and chancery) were in competition with each other.
* Substantial law on almost all matters was neither legislated nor codified, eliminating the need for courts to interpret legislation.
* Common law's main distinctive features and focus were not substantial law, which was customary law, but procedural.
* The practice of citing previous cases was not to find binding legal rules but as evidence of custom.
* Customary law was not a rational and consistent body of rules and did not require a system of binding precedent.
* Before the printing press, the state of the written records of cases rendered the ''stare decisis'' doctrine utterly impracticable.

These features changed over time, opening the door to the doctrine of ''stare decisis'':
{{Blockquote| By the end of the eighteenth century, the [[common law]] courts had absorbed most of the business of their nonroyal competitors, although there was still internal competition among the different [[common law]] courts themselves. During the nineteenth century, legal reform movements in both England and the United States brought this to an end as well by merging the various [[common law]] courts into a unified system of courts with a formal hierarchical structure. This and the advent of reliable private case reporters made adherence to the doctrine of ''stare decisis'' practical and the practice soon evolved of holding judges to be bound by the decisions of courts of superior or equal status in their jurisdiction.<ref>{{cite book|title=Hayek, the Common Law, and Fluid Drive|first=John|last=Hasnas|publisher=NYU Journal of Law & Liberty|volume=1|pages=92–93|url=http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/NYUFinal.pdf|access-date=2012-06-04|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150124010837/http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/gtwebsite/NYUFinal.pdf|archive-date=2015-01-24|url-status=dead}}</ref>}}