[Kell]

> Similarly, in Civil law jurisdictions (those that take traditions from the French) judges regularly rely on past rulings by respected judges.

You are indeed correct in most of your comment. But in France while it's true that judges read decisions by other judges, they will never ever quote another judge (except the ECHR). If for instance the Court de cassation (One of the French three (or four, or five, depends on how you count them) Supreme Courts) has said that "X has to be interpreted as Y". Lower judges will start using the sentence directly lifted from the Court de cassation decision "X should be interpreted as Y", but without quotation marks or any sort of attribution. It's a fiction that the judge came up with this interpretation by himself. Sometimes the judge will use some sort of caveat like "Il est constant que" ("It is always the case that") which is a way of saying that he is looking at precedent, without saying it explicitly.

If a judge did quote directly the Court de cassation with attribution, his decision could be appealed and be overthrown by the Court de cassation itself.

And if a judge disagrees with our Supreme Court, he will oftentimes without any hesitation "enter in resistance" (issuing decisions that go against the Court de cassation interpretation), the idea is that this is the way judges try to get the Supreme Court to change its opinion. This is also possible because he have more or less 90 judges in the Court de cassation, and turnover is quite high, so if a decision was only one or two votes in a direction (which no one knows because the votes are secret and the ratio of yays and nays also is secret), in a year, a judge or two at the court may change and the position could change.

My conclusion would be that in France we do respect precedent most of the time... but only if the judge agree with it. Our judges have a natural inclination to ignore precedent. Meanwhile in Common law countries, there is a natural inclination ot respect it... but sometimes judges disagree.

Caveat : In France, decisions by the Constitutional Council (the "Higher" Supreme Court... the Court of cassation would disagree on the "Higher" part) do create binding precedent... because those decision can change directly the text of the law. If the Council says that a sentence in a law is unconstitutional. Then the sentence is stripped out of the Code itself. Lower judges cannot therefore ignore it.