[nkkollaw]

It isn't a common law country, but there is the concept of precedent, and the majority of sentences will actually not override a previous sentence given the same kind of issue.

I was actually talking about this with a lawyer because of a problem I was having, and that's what he told me. You can pretty safely use precedents to guide you on what you want to do. The difference is that laws tend to of course carry less uncertainty than precedents, and you can't get punished if you were following a law (unless it gets changed retroactively). In case of a trial (in my case, at least), you would admit that you haven't followed the law, but cite the precedents and most likely win.

So, precedents are not binding, but in practice they're close to it.