  By contrast, arguments of equality bite where the court in the original case was confronted with a situation where the correct outcome was indeterminate, i.e., where more than one outcome was possible in light of the legally permissible arguments. This may be due to each outcome being equally well supported by reason, or by the outcomes being supported by different, incommensurable, values. In some of these cases the law has closure rules to settle the matter, e.g. in favour of criminal defendants, but in others there are no closure rules as to the appropriate substantive result to endorse. A possible illustration of such indeterminacy is the position of a person who quite innocently buys stolen goods. In some legal systems the purchaser acquires good title to those goods, whereas in others (such as the Common Law) she does not. Here, arguably, the merits of the two innocent parties (the purchaser and the original owner) are on a par, and all the law can do is choose which one is to prevail.  So where an outcome is underdetermined there are arguments of equality for later courts following the earlier decision rather than adopting any of the other possible solutions. None of this, of course, is an argument for following earlier decisions that were wrongly decided, since these are cases where the earlier court did not make a mistake, but took one permissible option.