Doctrine of precedent

A way of looking at the world that underpins everything the the lawyer holds dear — that there is nothing new under the sun, and if anything transpires to be, one should keep well clear of it.

The doctrine of precedent stands in contradistinction to theories of life that involve black swans, which hold that since, as a brute fact, there category of things that have not yet happened yet is unlimited; and however compendious the class of “previously encountered things under the sun” may be, it is of necessity finite, and that since an infinite number divided by a finite one is an infinite one, then risk managing by doing what you've always done in the past isn’t enormously prudent.