ABSTRACT
Rules are applied to facts. ‘The word “fact”, is treacherous, involving the old confusion between the actual situation and the description of it; the situation is given, but not the “facts of the situation”; to state the facts is to analyse and interpret the situation. The correspondence between material facts and the operative facts of legal rules depends upon the authenticity of the material facts themselves. If the view which the court takes of the total setting of a case is mistaken – or downright wrong – then the rationality of its decision is impaired. To insist in a legal case that the only facts which matter are those contemplated in applicable rules of law suggests that if there were no legal rules at all then there could be no material facts either. The economic and social purposes of legal rules are in a sense merely particular aspects of their general purposes.
