Precedent Inflation. The legal tussle between West Publishing and LEXIS over ownership of something as apparently trivial as the page numbers in legal citations gives some sense of the current economic importance of citation information in modern legal publishing (West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, Inc. [616 F. Supp. 1571 (D. Minn. 1985). Brenner [Brenner, 1992] shows how commercial concerns profitting from the publication of U.S. court opinions can mean that “precedent inflation” can occur! More generally, she argues that “the use of computers as case reporters will have the most profound impact upon precedent and stare decisis since Henry of Bratton, popularly know as Bracton, wrote a treatise on the laws and customs of England in the thirteenth century.”