ABSTRACT
A body of law can be “rational” in several different senses, depending on which of several possible courses legal thinking takes toward rationalization. The elaboration of ever more “legal propositions” reacts upon the specification and delimitation of the potentially relevant characteristics of the facts. Highly comprehensive schemes of legal casuistry have grown up upon the basis of a merely paratactic association, that is, of the analogy of extrinsic elements. The specifically modern form of systematization, which developed out of Roman law, has its point of departure in the logical analysis of the meaning of the legal propositions as well as of the social actions. The “legal relationships” and casuistry often resist this kind of manipulation, as they have grown out of concrete factual characteristics. The peculiarly professional, legalistic, and abstract approach to law in the modern sense is possible only in the measure that the law is formal in character.
