How can a court set a precedent and why is it important?
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Generally, when a court issues a ruling, they try to look to prior cases for similar fact patterns and rule in the same way. So when a new set of facts either has no precedent or conflicting precedents based on the peculiarities of that case, it often goes up to a higher court so that those courts can review the precedent. At the highest court, in the US the Supreme Court, there is no further court for it to go up to, so once that court rules on the case, not only does it resolve that case definitively, it now enters the pool of prior cases that lower court judges use to make their decisions again.
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