  It is often said that this creates a marked contrast with statutes, where a canonical formulation of the legal rule being laid down is provided. Given the flexibility open to later courts to determine the ratio of the earlier decision, it is misleading to think that decisions lay down binding rules for later courts. However, although there is a contrast with legislation here, it can be exaggerated. In both situations the propositions of law for which a case or statutory provision is authority must be derived from the case or statute and is not identical with the text of either. The real difference between precedent and statute lies in the fact that in the case of statutes legal systems have elaborate conventions of interpretation to assist in the process of deriving the law from a legislative text, whereas in the case of precedents they do not. But this simply shows that the law derived from precedents may be vaguer and more indeterminate than that derived from (many) statutes; it does not establish that precedents do not create legal rules.