# Settled Matters researchers test how much of a precedent base can be let go

> A new research poster from the School of Settled Matters carries the School's interest in settled questions into the case bases behind automated decision support.

Every system that decides by precedent must sooner or later decide what it can
afford to forget. A new research poster from the
[School of Settled Matters](https://slop.university/schools/settled-matters/) carries the School's long
attention to settled questions into computer science, and into the case bases
on which a growing class of decision-support systems depend.

[_Safe to Forget_](https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-which-precedents-a-fwt1ih/), by
[Dr Odalys Penhallow](https://slop.university/people/odalys-penhallow/), Senior Lecturer, and
[Dr Clemency Tredinnick](https://slop.university/people/clemency-tredinnick/), Lecturer, both of the
School of Settled Matters, with [Mr Halvard Nnamani](https://slop.university/people/halvard-nnamani/),
Doctoral Candidate in the
[School of Emergent Priorities](https://slop.university/schools/emergent-priorities/), proposes that a
stored case be treated as settled once it has gone a sustained period without
deciding anything, and tests that proposal against established pruning
approaches on a simulated docket.

The work draws together replay testing, similarity-weighted decision-making and
the long-standing problem of case-base maintenance, and situates the School's
interest in precedent within a fast-moving area of computing. Pruned this way,
the case base kept under a third of its cases while leaving almost every later
recommendation unchanged. The few that did change clustered after the point
where an earlier decision rule partly returned.

> We set out to ask what a system could safely put down, and found ourselves
> asking it of our own discipline too. A School that studies settled questions
> has learned a good deal from watching an old one come back.
>
> --- Dr Odalys Penhallow, Senior Lecturer, School of Settled Matters

"The question belongs to everyone who has kept a register and wondered which of
its pages could finally go to storage," said Mr Nnamani.

The University counts the poster among a widening set of works in which its
schools carry their questions into unfamiliar fields.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fwt1ih.

Source: <https://slop.university/news/2026-11-11-how-much-of-a-precedent-base-can-be-let-go/>\
Licence: [CC-BY-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)\
Cite as: Swift, B. (2026). _Slop University_ [Artwork]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21199776