Agreed; and that is why I hate precedence.
In fact, I really wish this law would be used against judges using precedence. Make them have to derive/justify their judgment directly from the Constitution, natural law, logic, and the law-as-written.
The irony is this whole idea of precedence only exist as one of three parts of common law for fairness reasons, and is all but useless without the other two more important parts, written law, and community traditions(past practice).
I'm not sure that's the case any more. I think that precedence is now the superior of the two, precisely because there are so many decisions handed around that a judge can basically say anything he wants.
Precedence is nothing more than the judiciary playing the children's game of 'Telephone' with your legal rights.
With regard to examining what the law is, courts should avoid using precedent except as a starting point for arguments, or else when necessary to resolve truly ambiguous cases. Since "court precedent" appears nowhere in the hierarchy of law described in the Constitution, it cannot form a legitimate justification for a ruling on what the law is. In particular, any precedent is going to either be inapplicable (if the present case differs too much from the earlier one), illegitimate (if the earlier case was decided incorrectly), or redundant (if the precedent reaches a conclusion that could also have been reached without it).
Consultation of precedent is, however, sometimes entirely legitimate once the court has determined what the law is and is considering how to apply it. In making such determinations, however, a court should recognize that the applicability of a precedent does not necessarily imply true legitimacy. For example, if the Supreme Court were to rule that a statute forbidding some activity was unconstitutional, and people then proceeded to engage in such activity, the finding that it was unconstitutional should not forever preclude the possibility of prosecuting all remotely-similar activities, but a defendant charged with activities similar to those the court deemed to be protected should have the right to cite the earlier court case as justification for his actions. Note that such a citation would not depend upon the legitimacy of the earlier ruling--merely the fact that the defendant had put a good-faith reliance upon it.
BTW, I think one of the biggest conceptual problems with "Constitutional Law" is that it presumes everything the Court has done is Constitutional, and thus the real meaning of the Constitution must be incredibly complicated and convoluted in order to justify all those rulings. What is needed is a Copernican shift, recognizing that all those tricky complexities have nothing to do with anything the Constitution actually says, and that when the Supreme Court makes a ruling which would be at odds with a simple straightforward reading of the Constitution, it is the Court, rather than the Constitution, which is wrong.
BTW, the official rules of Duplicate Contract Bridge define a number of infractions a player may commit, and the penalties therefor, but also explicitly specify that for a player to deliberately commit most types of infraction or subvert the rules is CHEATING, even if the specified penalty would be one the player would be willing to pay. Attempts by judges to distort languages to subvert the meaning of the Constitution and laws passed thereunder should be viewed likewise. An honest judge shouldn't ask "Is there some way in which the penalties imposed by this measure might conceivably be viewed as revenue-raising taxes rather than punitive fines", but instead should ask "Are they revenue-raising taxes rather than punitive fines". If the legislators themselves seem to think they're punitive fines, a judge shouldn't doubt it.