• This does not actually follow. Trying to claim that your bagatelle is entailed by Frank is simply wrong. He wrote, in fact, a book whose title--taken from James Madison--"If Men Were Angels," specifically announced rejection of your supposed inference. Perfectability of man was not his thing, and existentialism likewise. You could have found many ways of introducing your claims, and maybe you still should, although the claims themselves seem to me less compelling than they seem to you. But the way you are going is shut.

• Now you are being simplistic. In the first place, most judges I know are acutely conscious of their personal responsibility for the consequences of error. They are also highly knowledgeable about the environments in which they work, and are profoundly aware of the inevitability that any judgment they can make about most of the social situations that most pain them when seen in their courtroom is beyond their legal power and would not be properly executed even if they had the power to order it. They make the decisions the law allows them to make not only because they know what you are forgetting here, that the judge's power "to produce a personally acceptable outcome" is often nil, but also because they know that despite the tragic nature of impersonal procedural government, it is also the only tool for establishing the rule of law, which they consider (sometimes for sentimental and intellectually vacuous and sometimes for the most refined and thoughtful of reasons) an "inestimable blessing."

• This is a new proposition, which requires defense, and your strong phrasing of the idea almost guarantees that it is indefensible. Everything we think is wrong with formal systems is "simply" a failure to grant judges enough personal discretion? To establish that you have to disestablish many other purportedly contributing elements. Cohen is certain that the problem lies at least in part in properties of formal systems; in order to establish your proposition, you need to show that he is completely wrong. Similarly, you have to have a complete answer for all criticisms that suggest no amount of human moral responsibility will reverse inherent defects in human cognition and limits in human cogitation. Not to mention what I suppose we might call Robespierre Syndrome, or an absolutely virtuous willingness to take total moral responsibility for radical injustice. For which you must possess somewhere about you a complete and indeed retroactive cure good against every form of fanaticism that ever committed judicial murder with self-conscious self-righteousness. Wouldn't a weaker claim make more sense here? Even if it led to a more serious reconsideration of the topic as a whole....

• Here you half-admitted the presence of the difficulty, and then chose to put it behind you by mere force of bluster ("slippery slope to Nazism" is not a good way to make me believe you are taking someone else's argument seriously). All arguments in responsible persuasive writing must be "real," that is, they must acknowledge the presence of a serious issue arising from genuine disagreement between those who, sharing common grounds, reach differing conclusions. When you find yourself suddenly putting an unreal argument in the conclusion, you should immediately go from "writer mode" to "editor mode" and ask why a straw man has been slipped in at bedtime. It almost always indicates a serious flaw in some preceding argument now being covered too little, too late.

Individual Responsibility for Legal Outcomes

Summary

The Failure of Rules to Justify Outcomes

Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Argument Against Legal Rules

Although this change seems profound, Frank questions its meaningfulness. Any system of legal rules must draw its circumstance from the facts surrounding a case. The truth of these facts must in turn be determined by the human processes of investigation and secernment; truth must be differentiated and given meaning by a finite and limited individual. This factual basis of law makes decision by legal rules as contingent on human factors and circumstance as the disfavored methods of the ordeal. A system of reason and rules may blind us with its complexity, but is only as good as the truth it is based on.

Focusing on the Individual

Developing Truth-Deciders

One might expect two primary arguments to be leveled against such a scheme. The first argument focuses on the perceived instability or subjectivity of the system. This argument might assert that a system without a fixed and rational basis for decision lacks any bulwark against the swamp of moral relativism. Nothing prevents such a system from falling into a pattern of racial persecution and perceived immorality. This argument misses the fundamental point that a rule based system provides no greater moral stability. Humans, and therefore the prevailing social context in which individual conduct is based, are responsible for the eventual outcome in either scheme. This argument actually cuts against the ... in system focused on our personal responsibility for the