In first reading legal opinions when I started law school, I was handicapped by subconsciously imagining law to be a knowable engineering discipline, with accep

In first reading legal opinions when I started law school, I was handicapped by subconsciously imagining law to be a knowable engineering discipline, with accepted rules that could be learned and predictably applied. That's true to a certain extent, but only in roughly the sense that Ptolemaic astronomy is also true to a certain extent. One might say that the practice of law is more akin to weather forecasting than to engineering. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." [0] The basis for prediction is, in essence, looking to the outcomes of past power struggles between people who wanted what they wanted and sought to enlist others — courts, legislators, executives, the populace — in their cause. Equally famously, Holmes said: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, and even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." [1] [0] O.W. Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harvard Law Review 457 (1897), https://www.constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm https://www.constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm [1] O.W. Holmes, Jr., The Common Law, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2449 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2449