Distinguishing a case

Distinguishing a case is the technique by which a court or advocate avoids the application of a precedent by showing that its material facts or the legal issue it decided differ in a relevant way from the case at hand. A distinguished case is not overruled; it remains good law but is held not to control the present dispute.

Distinguishing is the principal way lawyers deal with unfavourable binding authority, since lower courts cannot simply refuse to follow a higher court's decision. The argument turns on identifying the precedent's ratio decidendi and showing that the facts grounding that ratio are absent. In legal research, citator treatment codes flag when later courts have distinguished a case; a decision that is frequently distinguished may be confined to narrow facts even though it has never been overruled.