


































The Limits of Logic and Procedure


 

 

 

 

The Bellarmine Law Society Review 

Volume XI Issue II                  Article 4 

 

Limits of Logic and Procedure 

Caitlin Colangelo 
Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, colangec@bc.edu 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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LIMITS OF LOGIC AND PROCEDURE 
 

CAITLIN COLANGELO * 
 

Abstract: The idea that the American legal system is meant to foster justice is agreed upon 
even by proponents of the most irreconcilable methods of legal interpretation. Going back 
to the intentions of the Founders, the judiciary “may truly be said to have neither force nor 
will, but merely judgment (Federalist 78). The efficacy of the Supreme Court depends on 
its structural legitimacy and public acceptance of its procedures. The Constitution was 
intended to stand in perpetuity, protecting the rights of the people for all time, according to 
the concretized will of the people at the Founding, as embodied in the Constitution. 
However, practical considerations beyond this agreement that the judiciary is intended to 
secure justice as delineated by the Constitution generate great controversy. Achieving the 
original goal of the judiciary becomes complicated when viewed in light of the discord 
between universal statements of the law and particular instances. This paper explores the 
relationship between justice, rationality, and precedent in order to answer the question: 
How can Supreme Court Justices reconcile with the gaps between formal logic, procedural 
legitimacy, and substantive justice? The approaches of legal pragmatism, originalism, and 
Dworkin’s moral reading are explored. 
 
 

The idea that the American legal system is meant to foster justice is agreed upon even by 

proponents of the most irreconcilable methods of legal interpretation. Going back to the intentions 

of the Founders, the judiciary “may truly be said to have neither force nor will, but merely 

judgment.”1 Federalist 78 stresses that the judiciary has neither an independent sword (method of 

enforcement) nor an independent purse (method of payment), and will, therefore, ultimately 

“depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”2 Consequently, 

the judiciary was intended to be a constrained branch of government solely designed to fairly settle 

disputes according to the law. The efficacy of the court depends on its structural legitimacy and 

public acceptance of its procedures. The Constitution was intended to stand in perpetuity, 

                                                             
* Caitlin Colangelo is a B.A. candidate majoring in Philosophy and is interested in moral philosophy, as well as the 
philosophy of the law. She would like to thank Professor Fried for his help in preparing this manuscript.  
1“Federalist No. 78.” The Avalon Project, accessed August 9, 2021. 
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed78.asp   
2 “Federalist No. 78.” 



 
 

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protecting the rights of the people for all time, according to the concretized will of the people at 

the Founding, as embodied in the Constitution. In a way, it is clear that the will of the people at 

the Founding was intended to reign supreme over the will of all future generations: the Constitution 

would become fundamental law. However, practical considerations beyond this agreement that the 

judiciary is intended to secure justice as delineated by the Constitution generate great controversy. 

Achieving the original goal of the judiciary becomes complicated when viewed in light of the 

discord between universal statements of the law and particular instances. This paper will explore 

the relationship between justice, rationality, and precedent in order to answer the question: How 

can Supreme Court Justices reconcile with the gaps between formal logic, procedural legitimacy, 

and substantive justice? 

The judiciary is tasked with fairly deciding cases, which involves closing the gap between 

universal principles and particular situations. Typically, it is understood that if one agrees with the 

following proposition: If A then B, If B then C, If C then D, one is committing oneself to: If A 

then D. However, in terms of the law, this conclusion is not always true. A judge may be committed 

to the universal proclamations of the first three conditional statements, but when faced with a 

particular situation, decide that the fourth conditional is not true. Catherine Wells describes the 

difference between two methods of legal interpretation in her book, Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

Making of Modern American Law. The first method is mechanical, and leaves no room for the 

rejection of “if A then D” if the previous premises are accepted. The other method is titled the 

pragmatic method. Under the pragmatic method of judicial decision making, “rules are not 

statements written on a piece of paper.”3 Instead, rules are a routinized way of “responding to like 

cases,” where the decision-making process outlined by precedent bears weight in deciding future 

                                                             
3 Catherine Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 
156. 



 
 

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cases, not the substance of the precedent itself.4 Wells explains that Justice Holmes believed, "what 

is expedient for the community concerned" should overrule logic, which "create[s] the appearance 

that each decision follow[s] syllogistically from existing precedents."5 Justice Holmes viewed 

precedent as a series of cases that illustrate practical policy, within their own contexts. For 

example, if a court is trying to decide if an employer should be held liable for an injury their 

employee incurred at work while on a lunch break, but taking a work-related phone call, the 

importance of the decision as precedent is the way the court decided the case, as opposed to the 

actual substantive decision reached by the court. The substantive decision in this instance would 

be if an employer can still be liable for an employee's injury even if the employee is not physically 

at their workplace, but is doing work assignments. 

Sometimes, judges decide cases broadly, and create legal doctrine which enumerates 

various considerations for future application of the law. These legal doctrines contain the primary 

importance of the cases as precedent. For example, in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. 

Sawyer, Justice Jackson distinguished three possible relationships between the executive power 

and Congressional authority. This case concerned the constitutionality of President Truman’s 

seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War. The workers of the steel mill were striking over 

poor working conditions, and the American government was concerned with the decrease in steel 

production due to increased demand of steel for war purposes. In a 6:3 decision, the Supreme Court 

decided that the President did not have the power to seize control over the mills. However, the 

precedential significance of this case was not the idea that the President cannot seize control of 

labor disputes, because it is plausible to think of scenarios in which control of labor disputes would 

be a proper exercise of Presidential powers. Instead, the importance of the case lies in Justice 

                                                             
4 Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to God, 156. 
5 Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to God, 178. 



 
 

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Jackson’s delineation of three possible modes of Presidential action and their corresponding 

burdens of proof. Justice Jackson describes the first situation as being when the President acts in 

pursuant to an order of Congress. In this case, the President’s authority is at maximum. The second 

situation is that in absence of Congressional grants and denials pertaining to a Presidential action, 

the President can only act on a case-by-case basis, in a “zone of twilight in which he and Congress 

may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain.”6 The third scenario is that 

when the President takes action against Congress, his or her power is at the lowest end, “for then 

he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress 

over the matter.”7 It is important to note that just because the President’s power is at its lowest end, 

the President’s action is not necessarily unconstitutional. Rather, the court applies the highest 

burden of proof to establish constitutionality. These three scenarios tell judges what questions to 

ask themselves in order to fairly decide cases and maintain consistency in their future decisions. 

If this case created a simple if-then statement, ‘If the President seizes control over labor 

disputes, then the act is unconstitutional because it is a violation of the separation of powers,’ the 

courts would actually be incapable of securing justice in the future. Each case’s decision is 

informed by the particular facts of the case, and by the broader background information of the 

case. For example, the relevant background information pertaining to the Youngstown case is the 

occurrence of the Korean War. The facts or background information of a future case may make a 

future presidential seizure of control over labor disputes constitutional. Therefore, in recognition 

of the unpredictability of future situations, and possible divergent facts, the decision of the case 

includes an outline of a decision making process to be followed by future cases, but does not 

                                                             
6 “Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952),” Justia Law, accessed August 9, 2021, 
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/343/579/.  
7 “Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).”  



 
 

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explicitly bind future cases to the decision itself. The gap between the substance of a universal law 

and a particular instance reproduces itself if precedent is treated as substantially important. A gap 

then exists between a particular instance and previous precedent. The application of the universal 

phrasing of the Constitution onto a particular situation requires judges to make decisions in good 

faith. In contrast to legal pragmatism, mechanical decision making accepts procedural legitimacy 

as the superior goal above substantive justice.  

Originalist claims gain legitimacy over other types of constitutional interpretation by 

appealing to a type of mechanical decision making which looks to the original meaning of a text 

to fill the gap between a universal law and a particular instance. Originalism is similar to syllogistic 

decision making because it appeals to the same underlying principle: the law is objectively 

determined and applied without judicial interference. A valid concern about legal pragmatism is 

that “judges can do what they want,” creating tyranny within the judicial branch.8 Legal 

pragmatism seems to give the judiciary the ‘will’ that Federalist 78 warns against. Unrestrained 

judicial freedom was clearly not intended by the Founders. However, as Wells explains, “although 

judges are not bound by any particular formulation of the rule, they are bound to apply the rule in 

this pragmatic sense.”9 Under Justice Holmes’s model of interpretation, although judges are not 

bound in substance, they are bound to a decision making model. And still, it is true that pragmatism 

trusts judges with quite a bit of wiggle room. Legal pragmatism secures procedural justice in a 

loose sense, but if perfectly implemented, with moral judges seeking the public good, it secures 

substantive justice without fail.  

In contrast, originalism secures procedural justice and accepts that it may fail to secure 

substantive justice in some instances. Originalism appeals to the moral principle that the will of 

                                                             
8 Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to God, 160.  
9 Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to God, 161.  



 
 

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the legislature is above the courts, and that the courts are not meant to interpret the law in a way 

that creates ‘better’ policy. The problem with the claim that originalism achieves unbiased 

interpretation of the law is that it fails to recognize that the discernment of the original public 

meaning of a text is subjective, as is the application of the rule to modern circumstances. The 

judges’ personal beliefs will inevitably influence their interpretations. Scalia argues that because  

he looks for “‘objectified’ intent - the intent that a reasonable person would gather from the text 

of the law,” he is immune to deciding that “law means what [he] think[s] it ought to mean.”10 

However, in discerning what the people at the time understood a law to mean, judges are asked to 

act as historians.11 The original public meaning of a text is often unclear, and in areas of ambiguity, 

it can be decided that “the original understandings [say] pretty much what the person examining 

them want[s] them to say.”12 In practice, originalist methods are still more restrained than a moral 

reading of the Constitution because there is greater room for disagreement over morality than there 

is over the original public meaning of a text, and how to apply this understanding to modern 

circumstances. Nearly anything can be construed to be a type of moral interpretation, but valid 

applications of the past public meaning of a law and modern circumstances are more constrained. 

Dworkin’s moral reading of the Constitution arguably lacks procedural legitimacy but 

secures substantive justice depending on the morality of the interpreter. Dworkin assumes the 

law’s purpose is ethical, and believes that a law’s substantive meaning is its underlying moral 

principle. According to Dworkin, this interpretation is not unrestrained-- precedent, and the general 

moral trend underlying laws in the society, constrain the interpretation. Some laws, like the 

Fourteenth Amendment, are so broadly phrased that it is clear they were intended to promulgate a 

                                                             
10 Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17-18.  
11 David Strauss, The Living Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19.  
12 Strauss, The Living Constitution, 21.  



 
 

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general moral principle. Dworkin acknowledges that this method of interpretation is subjective: 

“judges whose political convictions are conservative will naturally interpret abstract constitutional 

principles in a conservative way.”13 In this mode of interpretation, judges extract a moral principle 

from a universal law, and apply this to a particular instance. The application onto particularity is 

constrained by “history and integrity” (precedent), so the decision fits into a general legal trend.14 

Under this mode of interpretation, securing substantive justice is dependent on the moral beliefs 

of the judges. The main difference between originalist interpretations and legal pragmatism or 

Dworkin’s moral reading is that originalist interpretations impose no duty rooted in individual 

judges’ sense of morality, whereas other approaches embrace a moral duty of the judicial branch. 

Originalism appeals to a broad moral duty independent of each judge’s individual morality: to 

uphold the people’s will as concretized by the law in a democratic constitutional system. Given 

the contents of Federalist 78, it is clear that unbiased interpreters were desired by the Founders. 

In this sense, originalism (on its face) seems to best achieve the goal of unbiased interpretation 

without judicial interference, despite the fact that originalists are still influenced by their own 

morality when they determine the text’s original meaning and application to modern scenarios. 

There is subjectivity involved in every instance of closing the gap between universal and particular 

instances. A moral reading of the Constitution, and pragmatist readings which emphasize the 

particularity and uniqueness of situations, hold the ideal of substantive justice above pure 

procedural justice.  

Although the legal system’s purpose is to create a formalized and objective system to fairly 

settle disputes, pure rationality is ineffective in applications of the law because of the diversity of 

                                                             
13 Ronald Dworkin, “The Moral Reading of the Constitution,” The New York Review, accessed August 9, 2021, 
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/03/21/the-moral-reading-of-the-constitution/.  
14 Dworkin, “The Moral Reading of the Constitution.” 



 
 

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particular instances and the superior goal of the judiciary to secure substantive justice. Precedent 

is invaluable because it creates a decision making outline, which constrains judges, and allows 

them to maintain consistency in future decisions. Judges have to recognize when to go beyond 

strict 1 + 1 = 2 mathematical logic in order to reach a practical decision that is substantively just. 

Sometimes, a procedurally just decision, although secure in its formal logic, makes little practical 

sense. Originalist methods that seek to apply the original meaning of the law to present 

circumstances are negatively restrained in their formalism. Non-originalist methods of 

interpretation are not less legitimate because securing justice cannot be formalized completely 

because of the nature of the act. Aristotle defines epieikeia in Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics, 

explaining that epieikeia is the exercise of what is reasonable, fair, or equitable. He explains that 

the law sometimes runs incongruent to the facts at hand, but “the error is not in the law; or in the 

lawgiver, but in the nature of the case” because “all law is universal, and yet there are some things 

about which it is not possible to make correct universal pronouncements.”15  Judges must use 

epieikeia to make equitable decisions to secure justice.  

But, once it is decided that substantive justice is superior to procedural justice, the 

importance of the moral beliefs of each individual judge takes the stage. In contrast, if one commits 

to the unattainable ideal of the Founders, and ignores that unbiased decision making is impossible, 

judges can falsely claim that their political ideologies do not influence their decision making under 

originalism (although as previously discussed, morality does influence their interpretations). The 

main incongruence between legal interpretive methods stems from the unattainable ideal of an 

objective interpreter, and the societal practical function of judges to protect the rights of minorities 

and produce fair and substantively just decisions. Under legal pragmatism and a moral reading of 

                                                             
15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 174. 



 
 

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the Constitution, it’s clear one would want Justices to share one’s own moral values. And as 

explained, one would also want originalist Justices to share one’s own moral values because 

originalism is subjectivity hiding under the guise of unbiased interpretation. Therefore, an 

ideologically balanced court is important to guard against the fallible morality of likeminded 

individual Justices. An unbalanced Supreme Court would lead to the dominance of one moral 

ideology, making it difficult for the Supreme Court to reach fair decisions. The morality of 

different judges must act as a check on one another. The Supreme Court cannot be trusted to ‘get 

it right’ in all instances, and the fallibility of individual judges is comparable to the fallibility of 

professionals in any other field. Overall, the Supreme Court’s interpretations cannot be objective, 

and so the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction should be limited by rules like the political questions 

doctrine in order to curb its power. 

 

  



 
 

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Bibliography 

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher Rowe. Oxford: Oxford University  

Press, 2002. 
The Avalon Project. “Federalist No. 78.” Accessed August 9, 2021.  

avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed78.asp.  
Dworkin, Ronald. “The Moral Reading of the Constitution,” The New York Review,  

accessed August 9, 2021.  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/03/21/the-moral-
reading-of-the-constitution/. 

Justia Law. “Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).” Accessed August  
9, 2021. supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/343/579/.  

Scalia, Antonin. A Matter of Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.  
Strauss, David. The Living Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.  

Wells, Catherine. Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to God. Cambridge: Cambridge  
University Press, 2020.   
 


