Law, perhaps even more than man, is a creature of habit. It thrives on the humdrum. It likes nothing better than demonstrations that one case is just like some other in all relevant respects. It is a creature of habit in a more literal sense too, in that legal rules often crystallize out of the usual practices of a community ― though as I recently pointed out, this is not always a good thing. But how does the law deal with the new, the unusual, the unprecedented? How do, and how should, judges respond when they confront situations never faced by their colleagues and predecessors? Some recent blog posts by Gerard Magliocca and Kyle Graham explore some aspects of this question.
Prof. Magliocca is interested in assertions by a court engaged in judicial review of legislation that the statute at issue is unusual, asking “whether this concern constitutes an independent theory of heightened scrutiny.” He suggests a number of reasons for why this might be the case:
One possibility … is that this a rhetorical move. Characterizing a law as strange implies that finding it invalid will not endanger other laws. Or it simply prepares the ground for a conclusion of unconstitutionality by undermining the authority of the law.
Another thought is that an unusual law raises questions about its motivation. Why did the legislature pass this curiosity? Could be because they were trying to achieve an improper goal or circumvent a constitutional obstacle.
A third possibility … is [that] this is the modern version of the common law rule of “construing statutes in derogation of the common law narrowly.” In effect, tradition should be given considerable weight in interpretation.
For his part, prof. Graham is interested in “the dog that didn’t bark” arguments to the effect that the absence of judicial decisions holding that x is the law means that x is not the law. He contends that such arguments aren’t persuasive, because “a precedent desert” might be due to a number of factors that have little to do with the correctness of the proposition that x is or is not the law. It might not be worth litigating the point because the remedies available are unattractive, or the cases might be settled before being resolved by courts. Indeed, however we might expect or wish otherwise,
lots of the area that lies within the boundaries of the legal “map” remains terra incognita in the sense that there exist no published opinions squarely on point. As every first-year law-firm associate learns (after having a partner utter the awful words, “I know there must be a case on point out there; find it”), even with thousands of case reporters and an ever-growing pool of impossibly deep electronic databases to draw from, there exist many commonplace fact patterns that have generated little or no published precedent.
For what little it’s worth, I inclined to agree with prof. Graham. I think, for example, that A.V. Dicey was badly mistaken when he argued that the absence of precedents in which courts enforce constitutional conventions meant that conventions were incapable of judicial enforcement and indeed not part of law at all. (I develop this point in my paper “Towards a Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conventions”, 11 Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal 29 (2011).) At the same time, I sympathize with courts looking at “unusual” statutes with some suspicion. When, in a recent post, I have described a Saskatchewan statutory provision allowing a newly-elected government to fire members of most provincial administrative agencies as “very unusual,” it was not only a statement of fact, but, at the same time, a way of indicating wariness and disapproval.
These are only hunches though, and of course the question arises whether they are inconsistent. In other words, should we draw the same conclusions from what prof. Graham calls a “precedent desert” in statutory law as in judicial decisions? And if so, what should these conclusions be? Does the absence of judicial precedent mean something more than prof. Graham thinks, or are courts wrong to make something of the unusualness of the legislation they are reviewing? Or is the best attitude a sort of compromise that consists in a Burkean conservative attitude of treating all novelties, whether legislation or legal claims, as presumptively suspicious but not conclusively impermissible?
I haven’t thought enough, or intelligently enough, about these questions to say something very profound. The most I can venture is that beyond its sometimes useful, sometimes annoying preference for sticking to the familiar, law is concerned with its coherence (or, to use the loftier Dworkinian idea, “integrity”). It is not closed to new claims, rules, or arguments, but if it accepts them, it must integrate them, assimilate them, make them part of the system. It must, as prof. Magliocca puts it, “tam[e] exotic beasts” and domesticate them. It is probably not unnatural that courts sometimes recoil at that task ― but it does not necessarily follow that are justified in doing so.
Double Aspect 
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