In my experience, it's not that silent law exists only in judges' heads, so much as that the judges decide where they want to end up and then reason backward to

In my experience, it's not that silent law exists only in judges' heads, so much as that the judges decide where they want to end up and then reason backward to create a decisional path that leads to the desired conclusion. This is, of course, blatantly wrong and not how the judicial system ought to work. For this reason (among others) we have the appellate process. Problems compound when the appellate panel does the same thing. Based on my experiences over years, both working in chambers and litigating, judges on a particular end of the spectrum tend to do this more than those on the other end.