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Case law (also known as decisional law or judicial precedent) is that body of reported judicial opinions in countries that have common law legal systems. It includes courts' interpretations of statutes, and also constitutional provisions and administrative rules. Published court opinions include precedents, or rules governing future court decisions. Common-law upholds the fundamental English legal system, which is the jurisdiction to make laws. Additionally, constitutional law continues the case law of people's human rights. Case law is a method of deciding cases based on recorded decisions of similar cases.

In the United States, law derived from judicial decisions is also referred to as common law. This type of law operates by application of precedent and so is also known as precedential law. Because case law is not enacted by a legislature, it is also a type of non-statutory law.

Case law is judge-made law that interprets prior case law, statutes and other legal authority. Judges may also refer to persuasive authority such as the Corpus Juris Secundum, Halsbury's Laws of England or the doctrinal writings found in the Recueil Dalloz and law commissions such as the American Law Institute

In the civil law tradition, case law formally plays a minor role compared to the status of the civil code; however, judicial interpretation of the civil code, interpreting the legal meaning of the code's provisions, clarifying them, and providing for unforeseen developments, is often referred to as a jurisprudence constante. In France, the jurisprudence constante of the Cour de cassation (for civil and penal cases) or the Conseil d'État (for administrative cases) is in practice equivalent to case law, and is considerably important in certain areas such as labor law and administrative law. In particular, the Conseil d'État and the Constitutional Council have adopted "fundamental principles" that statutes and regulations must follow, even when those principles were not explicitly written in statutes.

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