ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how judicial decisions can be construed as a species of rational action and how the judicial opinions supporting such decisions can be regarded as rational justifications presented by the judge to explain his decision. From a philosophical point of view, we are interested in whether rationality is a logical requirement or an ethical requirement or not a requirement at all of a judicial decision. And from the jurisprudential point of view, the question leads in one form or another to the problem of the nature of logic in the law: whether judicial thinking is deductive, inductive, calculative, reasoning by analogy, or whether it has a special logic of its own or no logic whatsoever. The best way to bring out the issues involved in explicating the nature of rational judicial decision is to consider one rather extreme theory of the judge's function. The chapter explores the consequences of assimilating judicial decisions to rational actions in general.
