1. "After all, children do not revere meaningless legal principles – children make outcome-based inquiries and seek functional answers." Maybe your experience wasn't about being a child--it was about being a client. Clients aren't interested in estoppel or laches or whatever other transcendental nonsense. They want to know if they can get what they want. It's interesting that you associate an outcome-based inquiry with childhood, when most clients are that way. Maybe because you've started law school, you look at the difference between child-Courtney and adult-Courtney, but really it's client-Courtney and counsel-Courtney.

2. "Thus, while speaking and writing as though to a child may not always be feasible, perhaps what’s more important is simply for judges and lawyers to replace the fictions of traditional jurisprudence with honesty in their spoken and written word." I've often thought about this, too. But I think it is actually just impossible to replace jurisprudence with honesty since in modern disputes there are often so many interested parties, many of them sophisticated, that there is simply no way to just be 'honest.' Courts can be fair, but sophisticated parties need to be able to make predictions about courts would do, as Holmes would say, and the transcendental nonsense makes that possible. When the parties are not sophisticated, I actually completely agree with you, and we could probably get by with just equitable principles.

-- HarryKhanna - 20 Jul 2012