When Lawyers Sing - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias

How do cultures change, especially re keys value-laden norms? In a stable society with long established norms, experience in applying those norms should have long given most people pretty clear ideas of what they imply for particular cases. Most people would try to keep their talk and acts consistent with such norms, expecting to suffer penalties that increase with deviation size. In this environment, norms seem unlikely to noticeably change, though they might drift imperceptibly over generations. And this pattern often held in the ancient world.

But in our world today, key norms change quite noticeably over short time periods, and the people seen as most directly responsible for such changes are often celebrated, not censured, for doing so. But how can that make any sense, if we in fact feel very attached to our key norms and penalize deviations from them?

Consider law under a system of precedent. Each new legal case not only applies existing law, it also creates a precedent for future cases. Law uses many abstract concepts, and their application requires many associated choices of bright lines, exceptions, and relative priorities. As a result, it is quite often just not clear what decision is implied by prior precedent. 

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