ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to stimulate comparisons with the ways and the termini of the rational process in political and scientific thinking. Some general observations on rationality may tentatively emerge from a study of the judicial process. A convenient framework is at hand in Benjamin N. Cardozo's analysis of the judicial process. There are four elements in judicial reasoning: logic, precedent, history, and social utility. First is logic which embraces the notions of generality, consistency, deduction, and induction. When one turns from precedents to facts of life as elements of induction, one must recognize that the facts are not given in a raw sense but are themselves part of a social system which makes them intelligible and which must itself be understood. Of history it may be said briefly that its usefulness varies inversely with the weight of the demands made on it. Social utility, the fourth of Cardozo's elements, is in a broad sense, as he acknowledged, an inclusive criterion.
