Michael Schuetz has posted Beyond Rules: Practical Wisdom, Pragmatism, and the Practice of Judgment in U.S. Jurisprudence on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Traditional models of legal reasoning often portray adjudication as a rule-governed or method-driven enterprise capable of producing determinate and neutral outcomes. This article argues that such accounts underestimate the forms of judgment that legal decision-making actually requires, particularly in an era where increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence risks reducing law to an algorithmic enterprise and heightened political polarization encourages a retreat into rigid interpretive dogmas. Because adjudication operates under conditions of linguistic indeterminacy, doctrinal underdetermination, and general value pluralism, legal reasoning cannot be adequately explained as the mechanical application of rules alone. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that draws on American pragmatism, legal realism, Aristotelian virtue ethics, and contemporary cognitive science, the article develops a framework centered on practical wisdom (phronesis). Practical wisdom is not a substitute for rules or institutional constraint; rather, it is the disciplined capacity that enables judges (and other legal actors) to perceive morally salient features, achieve a situational harmony among complex disputes, and exercise reasoned choice in hard cases where legal sources do not dictate a single outcome. The article is primarily descriptive and pedagogical. It seeks to clarify the cognitive and ethical capacities already implicit in principled adjudication, while resisting both rationalist rigidity and unbounded subjectivism or decisionism. In doing so, it offers a layered conception of legal rationality that attempts to preserve the rule of law while foregrounding the essential human capacities on which responsible legal judgment ultimately depends.
Recommended.