The Authority of Precedents in Civil Law Systems

In this paper I'm primarily concerned with framing the role of precedents in terms of reasons that they can give to judges in various legal systems. The main purpose of the paper is to identify the ways in which precedents can be authoritative in judicial reasoning. First, I'll explain the distinction between two kinds of precedents - precedents of solution and precedents of interpretation. Second, I'll identify the ways in which both precedents of solution and precedents of interpretation affect the reasoning of future courts, and focus on the cases in which this affection can be considered practically and epistemically authoritative. Finally, I'll consider the conditions under which it can be epistemically justified to treat precedents as authoritative, with a focus on the possibility of justifying the epistemic authority of interpretative precedents.