Passage A:

Appellate courts decide far more disputes than they can address in opinions polished for future use. Allowing a court to designate some decisions as nonprecedential recognizes a practical difference between resolving a case and announcing a rule. Many appeals turn on settled doctrine applied to unusual records. Requiring every disposition to function as precedent would encourage judges either to write needlessly broad opinions or to devote scarce time to refining statements that add nothing to the law.

Nonprecedential opinions must still explain the result to the parties and remain open to public inspection. Their designation should mean only that later panels are not obliged to treat their phrasing as a rule. Lawyers may cite them for whatever persuasive value their reasoning earns, but a hurried application of settled law should not bind future courts simply because it was written by judges.

Passage B:

The distinction between deciding a case and making law is less stable than defenders of nonprecedential opinions suppose. When an appellate court interprets a rule and uses that interpretation to alter a person's legal rights, it supplies evidence of what the law permits. A later court that ignores dozens of similar dispositions while citing a single published opinion can create one law in official doctrine and another in routine administration.

Selective publication also conceals error patterns. A recurring difficulty may look settled only because decisions exposing disagreement are labeled nonprecedential. Caseload pressure is real, but the answer is candor about degrees of authority, not an on-off switch. Later courts might give a brief, fact-bound opinion less weight than a fully reasoned one; they should not be instructed in advance that the former has no precedential force. The quality of reasoning can justify weak authority. Administrative designation cannot justify legal invisibility.

Passage A would reserve a different objection for inconsistent results. If several nonprecedential decisions reveal that a nominally settled rule is producing conflict, that pattern may justify publication of a later opinion that resolves the conflict. It does not follow that each earlier formulation should itself have governed later panels. Patterns can be institutionally informative without turning every component into binding law. A designation system should therefore permit motions to publish and periodic review of recurring issues.

Passage B would answer that review after the fact cannot fully repair selection bias. The judges who decide which opinions look routine also decide which disagreements become visible enough to trigger review. Moreover, persuasive citation is an incomplete safeguard when lawyers with fewer resources cannot search the mass of dispositions as effectively as repeat litigants can. A doctrine that officially discounts those decisions may magnify that informational advantage. For Passage B, graded authority must be coupled with searchable access and an obligation to confront materially similar decisions, even when a court ultimately explains why their reasoning deserves little weight.