I was planning on writing something about pragmatism and the Suncor case here. But I won't. I'll start my inquiries further back. Let us begin with a notorious comment by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in "The Path of the Law" (1897). Holmes and the guiding spirit of this blog, William James, certainly knew each other well, in part because their fathers were friends. James and Holmes Jr. seem to me to have been frenemies. Still.... The comment I have in mind is a definition of law from the lawbreaker's point of view. Law is "the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious." That is, indeed, what one usually means when asking a lawyer" what is the law about X?" One means "I have done X, or I am asking for a friend -- what will happen to me/my friend?" What does James say? Look to Lecture VI of Pragmatism and you find this: Common-Law judges sometimes talk about the law , and schoolmasters talk about...