The closing act of the story concerns the drafting of the final judgment. The final task of judicial bureaucrats is to stitch together the fragmentary instructions received from the judges to create coherent and persuasive texts. Like weaving, the drafting process is all but smooth. Every time the warp meets the weft, loose threads come out which must be ironed out. Likewise, every new paragraph added to the text of a judgment reveals logical leaps, internal inconsistencies, and gaps in the reasoning that must be papered over for the decision to wield its prescriptive and symbolic authority. Despite these difficulties, the final decision – the magical artefact that makes the pride of our lot – is somehow churned out on time. Its seamless fabric, now up for scrutiny by journalists, practitioners, and scholars, carefully conceals the infinite series of choices, confrontations, and hesitations that marked every turn of the proceedings.

Looking at both sides of the Atlantic, d’Aspremont challenges the narrative that pits international legal formalists against non-formalists and the common assumption among international lawyers according to which Europeans are more wedded to formalism – generically understood as the acknowledgement of the constraining role of legal forms – than their realist American counterparts. He explores two sides of the narratives, the “East Atlantic tale” and the “West Atlantic tale,” with the aim of showing that both Europeans and Americans continue to demonstrate attachment to legal forms. The only significant differences between them lie in the way in which they seek to reinvent formalism and the role of legal forms

This chapter describes Holmes's two great scholarly works: the twelfth edition of Kent’s Commentaries and The Common Law. Both books entailed a prodigious amount of legal research into the history of the common law. Both were written at a time when the law was rapidly changing to accommodate the increased commercialization and industrialization in the last half of the nineteenth century. Many men – most notably Christopher Columbus Langdell – were proposing new theories of common law decision-making, but Holmes was unique in his historical approach. This chapter explains Holmes’s approach and addresses some of the misunderstandings and criticisms it has generated.

John Marshall Harlan the Elder is best known for his lonely judicial dissents in favor of civil rights for African-Americans, such as Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. A life-long Calvinist Presbyterian, Harlan had come to understand the Civil War as part of God’s plan to free the nation from the sin of slavery. Borrowing the method of typology from Bible reading, Harlan saw the Civil War as following the type set by the American founders who had overthrown the tyranny of kings. A former slaveholder, Harlan retained the idea that Anglo-Saxons were particularly good at creating constitutional governments. Anglo-Saxonism prompted him to try to extend equal rights to his church’s Presbyteries and to the inhabitants of American colonies after the Spanish-American war, but to avoid talking about so-called social rights that involved inter-racial schooling and marriage. His philosophy of legal formalism could not solve the problems of logic that resulted.