While procedural and substantive legal rules are crucial determinants in a particular dispute, previous attitudes and paradigms relating to particular areas of policy often continue to inform subsequent policy and legal changes. Invariably the courts must self-consciously grapple with the legal categories and doctrines handed down through precedent to address new situations and fill in the interstices of statutory enactments. This process is not simply by a neutral and detached application of rules to facts at a particular historical point but is the product of a sequence of decisions which have embedded and institutionalised certain outcomes (Shapiro and Stone Sweet 2002, 114). Within these outcomes history and the present are compressed into a decision which will in turn condition and in some sense direct subsequent decisions to move legal doctrine toward a preferred construct of how and why the rules should be applied; implicating and reflecting a wider legal tradition, governmental policy and socio-political order which undergird that tradition (Merryman 1994, 3-4).