The phrase "existing precedent" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to a rule or principle that has already been set in the past. For example, "The existing precedent of government intervention in health care makes it difficult to create a new policy."
If a decision merely applies existing precedent, it is retroactive.
The Solicitor General's lawyers press their arguments in a way that hews strictly to existing precedent.
Such a restrictive approach to as-applied challenges would also mark a notable deviation from existing precedent.
The Teague decision said that a ruling is retroactive if it applies existing precedent, but not if it announces a new legal principle.
Scarcely any Democrats rose to Sotomayor's defense on the New Haven case, except to say that she had followed existing precedent.
The court on Wednesday treated the issue of capital punishment for child rape as a fresh question, not governed by any existing precedent.
Other legal experts regard the existing precedents as binding.
(The Teague doctrine validates reasonable, good-faith interpretations of existing precedents made by state courts even though they are shown to be contrary to later decisions").
As the Duke University law professor Stephen Sachs argues in a recent paper, the case for the mandate's constitutionality is "uneasy" without necessarily being wrong: Given existing precedents and current legal doctrine, it's possible to find plausible justifications for the powers that the health care bill's authors are claiming in this case.
Those undertaking creative senior projects should be expected to produce a paper of approximately fifteen pages in which the student discusses such questions as the genre to be used in the project, existing precedents for the topic, and his or her strategy in working on the project.
There are no existing precedents".
