From your description, it sounds very similar to how the German system works in practice. As I understand it (not a lawyer, married to one), a lower court will in practice basically never go against the precedent of a higher court.

I think there's a sort of principle here that differs: what makes a law legitimate? One reason why I don't like the idea of common law is that it entails that tradition should carry a legal weight, above and beyond what it already always practically does. This is why people accuse Burke of 'ancestor worship' - you take ordinary, fallible people that just had the luck of living and acting in the past, then you treat their decisions as bearers of a measure of inherent authority.

It might be a tolerable system if you were living in a society with a proud and morally upright history, and I think that supposition is some of the impetus for Burke's defense of the idea of giving inherent ethical weight to tradition, but in reality, there are few nations on earth that have a history that is not a horrible can of worms.