Justification and Judicial Responsibility

These Centenary Lectures are devoted to the tension between rule and policy in adjudication. The charge to the lecturers suggests it is naive to suppose that the proper function of a court is to apply an established rule of law to the dispute before it. This topic has been a focus of legal theory at least since Holmes delivered his famous lecture, The Path of the Law --nearly as long as law has been taught at the University of California. It merits our continuing study