udge may consider it and decide that it is a correct precedent. Persuasive precedent can come from courts lower in the hierarchy, as seen in R v R (1991), where the House of Lords agreed and followed the same reasoning as the Court of Appeal. Decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and statements made obiter dicta. Where a case has been decided by a majority of judges, there may be some that don’t agree on what the law is, this is known as a dissenting judgement. In Candler v Crane, Christmas and Co., Lord Denning gave a dissenting judgement on the case, but the other judges didn’t agree with him. In 1964 however, The House of Lords decided he had been right, in the case of Hedley Byrne v Heller and Partners. The dissenting judgement persuaded them to follow it. Decisions from foreign courts may also have persuasive precedents.There are also other methods used by judges to prevent them from following precedents: Distinguishing is when a judge finds the material facts of the case he is deciding are sufficiently different for him to draw a distinction between the present case and previous precedent. Two cases demonstrating this process are Balfour v Balfour (1919) and Merritt v Merritt (1971). The first case was successful but the second was not, as although both involved a wife making a claim against her husband for breach of contract, there was enough different facts to distinguish them. Overruling is where a court in a later case states that the legal rule decided in an earlier case is wrong. It is used to prevent an injustice if the judges feel the first decision was wrong. This is illustrated in Pepper v Hart (1993) when the House of Lords ruled that Hansard could be consulted in statutory interpretation. This overrules the earlier decision in Davis v Johnson (1979). The last method is Reversing, and is when a higher court overturns the decision in a lower Court of Appeal, in the same case. This is agai...
