Abstrakt
England and other common law culture countries have, since the 19th century, been built on the doctrine of binding precedent - a single decision of the supreme court whose conclusions generally bind the court itself as well as all lower courts. On the contrary, in Continental Europe, legal theory has promoted, since the 19th century, the opinion that court decisions are no source of law and cannot be binding.
As much as the gap between the originally radically different concepts of continental and Anglo-American law has appreciably narrowed over the course of two centuries, evident differences between the two concepts still prevail. Most standard legal theory and methodology textbooks in continental countries deny that decisions of higher courts would be generally binding or operate as precedents.