It wasn't quite a genre, but a style of film-making – a plush, roseate humanism, with sunsets to match – whose precedents stretched as far back as Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind.
As he describes it, early Islamic lore (whose precedents can't be ignored) is overwhelmingly concerned with the avoidance of fitna, a term that can mean many undesirable things from sedition to confusion to war or anarchy; Islam deplores (though you can argue about how severely it seeks to punish) any kind of speech that leads to or in itself amounts to fitna.
Peale entered a statement in April 1852, alleging that McCulloh was accusing the Director and the accounting staff of "gross neglect of duty", and that McCulloh's attack on Peale's medal business was a slight on "the late venerable and much loved Adam Eckfeldt", whose precedent Peale stated he was following.
Others have also expressed apprehension about the concept, whose closest precedent is the use of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics on the two "Mermaid Avenue" albums that Billy Bragg and Wilco released in 1998 and 2000.
In answering these, and other questions at the outset of a January election whose only precedent is a century old, it's well worth revisiting the debates that dominated the Bjelke-Petersen era.
In his concurring opinion, the chief justice said legal precedents whose validity is "hotly contested" can be disregarded.
Relying too heavily on past precedents, whose relevancy may have diminished, can relegate a big idea to incrementalism.
This sets a dubious precedent (whose weight will be limited next?) and the court should be ashamed.
But the long-term effects of Roberts' ruling are less clear, and the burgeoning feeling on the left is that the chief justice may have found a way to preserve the court's non-partisan facade while setting a new precedent whose implications are the more powerful for being less visible.
In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.
This is not an attempt to bash the FT, whose ranking set the precedent for those of us who are interested in comparing programmes from around the world (although the Business Week ranking which was launched in 1988, ten years before the FT's was clearly the groundbreaker, it is only really useful for comparing American programmes).
