24 Thus accepting the effect of my judgment on 6 February 1998 was to render void the determinations of Taxing Officer Howe and accepting also that these were rendered void ab initio, that voidance necessarily post-dated the judgment of the Court of Appeal of 21 February 1996. There could be no suggestion that those Court of Appeal proceedings were in any fashion irregular by reason of events that subsequently occurred by virtue of my review. Accepting that the decision of the Court of Appeal was regular at the time it was handed down, it cannot be rendered a nullity merely because the determinations with which it was concerned have since been set aside in collateral proceedings. Thus by analogy a later setting aside of orders will not automatically render an earlier judgment a nullity. And quite apart from those considerations, an appellate judgment does not lose any precedential value, though the earlier overruled decision has no further effect. There must be many cases in the law reports in which the orders propounded were later set aside by agreement of the parties in settlement of an appeal. It has never been suggested that later courts are thereby precluded from relying upon the reasoning of those earlier decisions, whether or not bound by it.
25 Nor, in the present case, could the logical substratum of the Court of Appeal's judgment be properly treated as so altered (by avoidance of Deputy Registrar Howe's determination) as to be no longer binding, for reasons which I explain below. In essence, that reasoning was to preclude recovery of costs in challenging Deputy Registrar Howe's determination, prior to his completing any reconsideration. This was on the basis that such challenge was not pursuant to the Court's supervisory jurisdiction but necessarily under the Rules, which had been disregarded. Even if it should later transpire that the determination was void ab initio, it does not follow that premature applications so characterised could give rise now to cost orders, contrary to the Court of Appeal's decision that, in essence, costs should lie where they fall. I elaborate below on the steps to that result by reference to the Court of Appeal's reasoning as relied on in my judgment of 9 April 1999
26 In my judgment of 9 April 1999 reference is made directly to the Court of Appeal decision of 21 February 1996 firstly at para 9. In that paragraph, I quoted from my earlier judgment of 6 February 1998. The reference was in these terms:
"Finally the Plaintiff seeks cost orders against the Defendant and in particular an order that the Defendant pay the costs of the Plaintiff of the whole of the taxation process to date including the costs of all applications which have arisen to date from the entire failure of the taxation process, on an indemnity basis. In my judgment no such orders should be made. The Defendant has it is true put the Plaintiff to proof regarding the matter of bias, but the Defendant was entitled to do this. The Plaintiff would be put to proof in any event whether the Defendant had played a role or not in the initial stages of the present proceedings. It would be wholly inappropriate for cost orders to be made against the Defendant in the circumstances. Moreover the Defendant was entitled to contest the Plaintiff's contentions before the Taxing Officer, though it is to be regretted that the proceedings overall were contested by both parties in so unconstrained a way. However it is not possible to attribute a preponderance of responsibility for this to either party. All of this has, as Clarke JA observed (Wentworth v Wentworth at 36) "meant that the court, and officers of the court, have been required to spend an excessive amount of court time in resolving one incidental aspect of litigation between two people." That said, I do not detract from the Plaintiff's right to have this aspect of the Taxing Officer's determinations dealt with by this Court."