ABSTRACT
In the United Kingdom there are three jurisdictions, namely: England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. All UK courts are nowadays subject to the procedure of reference to the Court of Justice of the European Community (CJEC) sitting in Luxembourg. Judges in all courts in the United Kingdom except the House of Lords accept that they are bound by precedents set by higher courts and that the Court of Appeal is defeasibly bound by its own precedents. In all the jurisdictions of the UK, there is a plurality of published forms of law reports. A precedent can lose its normal force if decided per incuriam; that is, while the court was in ignorance of relevant precedent or statute law. The traditional doctrine of precedent in English common law has been that a precedent which is binding is binding only as to its ratio decidendi, that is, its 'rule of decision'.
