The Never-Ending Battle

In every era and area of law you find a never-ending battle between two groups of legal thinkers: formalists and functionalists. Each is connected to long-standing and honorable traditions in Anglo-American jurisprudence. The formalists tend toward the law side of those traditions the search for order and certainty and the functionalists tend toward the equity side the search for justice and meaning. All can agree that there is a time…