Blackstone y Bentham: los precedentes judiciales versus el “código completo de leyes”

In this essay I defend two arguments. The first one is that William Blackstone would not be a supporter of the fact that judicial precedents would be merely persuasive, as it is widely said; on the contrary, he defends their authority and bindingness despite of the fact that he did not provide a clear criterion for deciding when not to follow them. The second argument is that Jeremy Bentham was never a supporter of a strong constrain of judicial precedents and that, in the maturity of his thinking (with his proposal of the Pannomion, that is, a complete body of laws that ought to replace the common law), he ended by denying any authority to precedents. This will be useful to criticize a well-known thesis among scholars, defended by Jim Evans, according to which Bentham’s ideas would be one of the historical causes for the origin of modern doctrine of stare decisis in England.