THE ADVOCATE 213
VOL. 80 PART 2 MARCH 2022
THE WINE
COLUMN
By Michael Welsh, Q.C.*
This is the danger, when vice becomes a precedent.
—Ben Jonson
PRECEDENTIAL WINE
This column is a variation on a theme that I first explored in a column over
a decade ago, but that still amuses me. I periodically joke about how I enjoy
writing articles for a legal publication that have nothing to do with law. On
reflection, I have realized that, at least in one way, my joke is not true.
There is something that winemaking and lawmaking have in common.
That commonality is precedent. So I thought it might be fun to take some
quotations on precedent and innovation, legal and otherwise, and apply
them in the context of wine.
We lawyers all had it ingrained into our brains from the day we entered
law school that the law lives by precedent. As the Roman scholar Junius
said, “One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute
law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.” That is both the
strength and weakness of the common law. Without precedent, it would not
exist. Yet if bound fast to precedent, the law would become stale and moribund.
As the famous 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli
sagely and succinctly stated, “A precedent embalms a principle.”
* Michael Welsh, Q.C., is a bencher, although he does not write or drink in that capacity. His views expressed here are
entirely his own. Both the author and the Advocate endorse healthy and responsible attitudes towards alcohol.