precedent
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 266 U.S. 507 - Webster v. Fall · 1925Most cited · 1,256 citing opinions
questions lurking in the record
Questions which merely lurk in the record, neither brought to the attention of the court nor ruled upon, are not to be considered as having been so decided as to constitute precedents.
How often courts cite the cases defining “precedent”
Court decisions citing the 2 opinions that defined “precedent” — 1,391 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 2 definitions, chronological · 1925–1945
a test case in the legal sense," "a case which they refer to as a precedent." He further testified that the German words translated above simply as the English "if he can" may be fairly taken to mean "if he can properly do so" or "if he can possibly do so." And he further agreed that the word "Jeder," which he translated as "every," might properly be translated as "each." Thus altered, the phrase would read: "Each man if he properly can .