Table of Contents
Part I: The Blueprint
The call came on a Tuesday in May, a sliver of afternoon sun cutting across the polished mahogany of my desk.
The voice on the other end of the line was clipped, official, and life-altering.
It was from the White House Counsel’s Office.
My nomination to the United States Court of Appeals would be announced in the morning.
I remember hanging up the phone and feeling not a surge of elation, but a quiet, profound sense of correctness.
It felt like the final, logical step on a path I had been walking my entire life.
My journey to that moment was, in many ways, a case study in the making of a modern federal judge.
It was a path paved with the predictable flagstones of achievement: a law degree from Yale, where I was an editor of the Law Review 1; a coveted clerkship with a revered judge on the d+.C.
Circuit, a year spent polishing the gears of the great legal machine 1; a decade as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, where I learned the brutal mechanics of trial work and the weight of prosecutorial power 3; and finally, a named partnership at a firm where our clients were corporations with problems as complex as they were lucrative.
I had even spent a few years as an adjunct professor, teaching the intricate doctrines of administrative law to students whose faces held the same mixture of ambition and terror I remembered in my own.3
This trajectory, common to so many who ascend to the appellate bench, is not accidental.
It is a filtering process designed to select for certain qualities: analytical skill, intellectual stamina, an almost obsessive attention to detail, and a deep-seated belief in the power of reasoned argument.4
My success had reinforced in me a particular worldview.
I saw the law not as a messy, human endeavor, but as a magnificent, rational structure—a vast, intricate blueprint designed by minds far greater than my own.
The Constitution, the statutes, the vast library of precedent—these were the load-bearing walls, the crossbeams, the wiring diagrams.
My job, as I saw it, was simply to ensure the structure was built to Spec.
The confirmation process, a grueling public dissection of my life and writings, only hardened this conviction.5
Sitting before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was asked to articulate my judicial philosophy.
I spoke of judicial restraint, of fealty to text and original meaning.
“A judge’s role,” I said, quoting a line I had practiced until it felt like my own, “is to apply the law, not to make it.
My personal views, my policy preferences, are irrelevant.
I am bound to be faithful to the law, regardless of partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism”.7
I believed every word.
I saw myself as a guardian of the blueprint, an expert technician tasked with error correction.9
When a trial court deviated from the plan—misinterpreting a statute, misapplying a precedent—my duty was to step in, correct the error, and restore the structure’s integrity.
This philosophy of law as a perfectible, self-contained system is a comforting one.11
It offers clarity and purpose.
It elevates the judge above the grubby fray of politics and personal feeling.
It transforms the act of judging into an exercise of pure reason.
In my mind, the highest virtue of the law was its structural integrity, its
firmitas, to borrow a term from the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.12
And I, newly robed and confirmed, saw myself as its master architect, ready to enforce its pristine logic upon the world.
I had no inkling then that the blueprint tells you nothing of the mud, the sweat, the intractable bedrock, and the sheer, overwhelming chaos of the construction site.
Part II: The Shock of Construction
My chambers were quiet, paneled in dark wood, and lined with books that smelled of history and authority.
I had imagined my life as an appellate judge would be one of scholarly contemplation, of long, quiet afternoons spent tracing the elegant lines of legal logic.
The reality was a violent collision with paper.
A colleague had once warned me that an appellate judge’s lot is “all indoor work and no heavy lifting,” but he had failed to mention the sheer tonnage.13
Within a week, my desk, my credenza, and every available inch of floor space were covered in what I came to call the “Matterhorn of paper”.13
Stacks of briefs, appendices, and trial transcripts arrived daily, a relentless avalanche of facts, arguments, and human misery, all bound in pale blue or red covers.
My serene vision of a contemplative life evaporated, replaced by the frantic, humbling reality of judicial triage.13
I was no longer a scholar in a library; I was an emergency room doctor, forced to make snap judgments about which cases were bleeding out and which could wait.
The work was not about deep dives into legal philosophy but about ruthless efficiency: scan, assess, prioritize, delegate.
If I didn’t take at least one useful step with every document that crossed my desk, I would, as another judge had put it, “soon drown in the in-basket”.13
This deluge of paper was disorienting, but a deeper, more profound shock came from the nature of the work itself.
As an appellate judge, I was fundamentally disconnected from the raw, human drama of the law.
Unlike a trial judge, I could not take new evidence, hear from witnesses, or assess the credibility of a person telling their story.7
I was a prisoner of the “cold record,” a dry, disembodied transcript of proceedings that had happened months or years before.
This limitation, which had seemed a cornerstone of appellate objectivity, soon felt like a cage.
The case that broke my faith in the blueprint involved a man convicted of drug trafficking based on the testimony of a single police officer.
Reading the trial transcript, my gut screamed that the officer was lying.
His story was too neat, his memory too perfect.
The defendant’s testimony, though less polished, had the ring of bewildered truth.
As a trial lawyer, I would have cross-examined that officer into dust.
As a trial judge, I might well have found his testimony incredible.
But as an appellate judge, my hands were tied.
The legal standard was unforgiving.
I could only overturn the trial court’s factual findings if they were “clearly erroneous”.14
This is a formidable barrier.
It doesn’t mean I think the trial judge was wrong.
It doesn’t even mean I am certain the trial judge was wrong.
It means the finding was so devoid of evidentiary support that no reasonable jurist could have reached it.10
In this case, the trial judge had seen the officer testify and had chosen to believe him.
His word against the defendant’s.
Was it a mistake? I believed so, with every fiber of my being.
Was it “clearly erroneous”? No. There was
some evidence—the officer’s testimony—to support the finding.
I was trapped.
The blueprint—the procedural rules designed to ensure stability and respect for the trial process—was forcing me to affirm a conviction I believed was a profound injustice.
I felt a desperate temptation to “tweak the law,” to find some novel legal theory to justify a reversal, but I knew the danger of that path.13
Bad law, as the saying goes, is made in hard cases.
I stared at the pages, the cold, black-and-white text, and felt the first major crack form in my intellectual foundation.
The law’s perfect, rational structure had produced a result that felt deeply, irrationally wrong.
Compounding this sense of alienation was the modern machinery of the appellate court.
I had two brilliant law clerks, recent graduates from top schools, eager and terrifyingly smart.2
I had envisioned them as Socratic partners, intellectual sparring partners in the search for truth.
Instead, the sheer volume of work transformed me, as Richard Posner has acerbically noted, into little more than a “staff supervisor and editor of others’ work”.15
The pressure to move the docket created a powerful incentive to delegate the initial drafting of opinions.
But reading a draft written by a 25-year-old, no matter how brilliant, felt hollow.
It wasn’t my voice, my reasoning.
It was a well-crafted imitation.13
The process became a struggle between the need for efficiency and the demands of intellectual integrity, a bureaucratization of the very act of judgment.
The architect was becoming a manager, and the grand design was being lost in a blizzard of paperwork.
Part III: The Room of Mirrors: Collegiality and Compromise
My initial conception of judging was a solitary one: a single mind wrestling with a legal problem until the correct answer revealed itself.
I quickly learned that appellate judging is a team sport, and a contact sport at that.
Every appeal in my circuit, as in most federal and state systems, is decided not by one judge, but by a randomly assigned panel of three.7
My first few months were a jarring introduction to the world of collegiality—a sterile term for the messy, unpredictable, and deeply human process of three people trying to agree on the law.
I would prepare for oral argument with monastic devotion, reading every case, tracing every argument, and arriving at what I felt was the ineluctable legal conclusion.
Then I would walk into the conference room and enter a hall of mirrors.
The same facts and the same law, reflected through the minds of my two colleagues, produced startlingly different images.
One judge, a former legislator, might focus almost exclusively on the practical consequences of a potential ruling, probing the lawyers on how it would affect industry or public policy.
Another, a long-serving former district judge, might be preoccupied with a subtle procedural issue that I had dismissed as trivial.
I was, as one guide for new judges notes, “repeatedly surprised by the large variety of ways in which their colleagues can reason”.13
The true crucible of this new reality was a case concerning the scope of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.
The police had used a novel piece of surveillance technology to track a suspect without a warrant.
The technology was so new that no existing precedent was directly on point.16
I saw it as a clear constitutional violation, an intrusion into a reasonable expectation of privacy.
One of my colleagues, however, was deeply concerned about the implications for law enforcement and argued for a narrow interpretation of “search.” My other colleague was on the fence, torn between the two positions.
The conference room became a battleground of ideas.
I laid out my argument, which I believed was a model of logical precision.
But logic alone was not enough.
The conversation was a dance of persuasion, deference, and intellectual horse-trading.
It required a skill set I had never needed as a trial lawyer who ran his own courtroom: the ability to be collaborative, to listen, to concede a minor point to gain ground on a major one, to check my ego at the door.17
The goal was no longer to be “right” in the abstract; the goal was to secure a second vote.18
In that room, I saw the archetypes of judicial behavior that legal realists like Posner have theorized about.
There was the “opinionated” judge, driving the conversation with the force of their conviction, and there was the temptation, even in myself, to become a “go-along voter”—to acquiesce simply to end the debate and clear the docket, a rational choice for a judge whose utility function includes a hefty dose of “leisure” or “hassle-aversion”.19
In the end, I failed.
My two colleagues found a point of compromise that excluded my core reasoning.
I was outvoted, 2-1.
The senior judge assigned the majority opinion to my colleague, and I was left with the choice of quietly concurring or writing a dissent.
I chose to dissent, pouring my frustration and conviction onto the page.
But it was a lonely, hollow victory.
A few weeks later, the court’s decision was published.
The majority opinion, bearing the court’s authority, became “the law” of our circuit.
My dissent was just…
an opinion.
It was a profound blow, not to my ego, but to my understanding of what “the law” Is. I had believed it was a singular, objective truth waiting to be discovered through rigorous analysis.
I now saw that it could be a negotiated settlement, a product of the specific, contingent combination of three human minds in a single room on a particular day.
The institution, by design, diffuses accountability across the panel.10
But for me, it felt like a deeply personal failure.
I had entered the room of mirrors believing I could show my colleagues the one true reflection of the law.
I left understanding that the law itself was the reflection, a shifting image created by our collective gaze.
Part IV: The Ghost in the Machine: Analogy and the Unwritten Code
The case arrived on the docket with an air of impossibility.
It was a “case of first impression,” a term of art that fails to capture the vertigo a judge feels when confronted with a true legal void.20
The dispute involved liability for a catastrophic failure in a complex, multi-agent artificial intelligence system—a scenario the drafters of our tort laws could never have conceived.
There was no statute on point.
There was no controlling precedent.
The legal blueprint, my trusted guide, was blank.
My first instinct was panic.
My entire career had been built on the application of existing rules.
I was a legal analyst, not a creator.
My clerks and I searched for weeks, running endless queries, digging through obscure treatises.
Nothing.
We were adrift in what the civil law tradition calls a legal gap, a space extra legem—outside the law.20
To decide the case, I couldn’t simply
apply the law.
I would have to, in a very real sense, make it.
It was the senior judge on my panel, a woman with thirty years of experience on the bench, who guided me through the fog.
“The blueprint is blank,” she said during our initial conference, “so we have to look at the architecture of the surrounding city.” What she was talking about was the ancient and essential art of legal reasoning by analogy.20
She walked me through the process, not as a dry academic exercise, but as a form of creative problem-solving.
The task was not to find a case with identical facts—an impossibility—but to identify the underlying principle, the ratio decidendi, of an existing legal rule and determine if that same principle should apply to our novel situation.20
She brought up the classic 19th-century case,
Adams v.
New Jersey Steamboat Co..20
The court in
Adams had to decide if a steamboat company was liable for money stolen from a passenger’s locked stateroom.
There was no “steamboat rule.” But there were two possible analogies.
Was a steamboat stateroom more like a room at an inn, where the innkeeper was held to a very high standard of liability for a guest’s property? Or was it more like a berth in a railroad sleeping car, where the liability was much lower?
The Adams court chose the innkeeper analogy.
Why? Because, the court reasoned, a passenger “procures and pays for his room for the same reasons that a guest at an inn does,” reposing an “extraordinary confidence” in the proprietor.22
The court looked past the superficial facts (water vs. land) to the underlying social and economic relationship.
The choice of analogy, my senior colleague explained, was not a logical deduction; it was a creative and value-laden judgment about the
purpose of the law.
It was a decision about what kind of world we wanted to live in—one where common carriers who provide lodging bear a heavy responsibility for their passengers’ safety, or one where they do not.
This was my epiphany.
The law was not a static blueprint.
It was a dynamic, evolving structure—less like a single building and more like a living city.
Precedents were the established neighborhoods, with clear streets and settled rules.
But on the frontiers, in the face of new technologies and new social arrangements, judges were called upon to be planners and architects, extending the grid, designing new structures that were harmonious with the old.
I began to see the law through the lens of architectural philosophy.12
The law has a
syntax—the rules of procedure and evidence that govern how legal arguments are constructed.
It has semantics—the contested meanings of words like “reasonable,” “due process,” and “negligence.” And, most importantly, it has pragmatics—its real-world context and application, its effect on the lives of the people it governs.
My role was not merely to ensure the structural integrity (firmitas) of the legal edifice.
It was to constantly question its utility (utilitas)—its function and purpose in a changing society.
The “legal gap” in my AI case was not a flaw in the system.
It was an invitation.
It was a space for reasoned creation.
We could analogize the AI to a manufacturer’s product, to an employee, to a wild animal, or to something entirely new.
Each analogy carried with it a different set of social and economic consequences.
The choice was not a technical one; it was a profound judgment about how to allocate risk and responsibility in the 21st century.
I had spent my career as a legal technician, a skilled interpreter of blueprints.
In that moment, grappling with the ghost in the machine, I realized I had to become a legal artisan.
I had to learn to work with the unwritten code, to reason from principle, and to help build the law, not just apply it.
This was the shift from a purely “corrective” view of my role to a “law-giving” one, a transformation that was both terrifying and exhilarating.10
Part V: Weathering the Storm: Justice, Politics, and Public Trust
Just as I was growing comfortable with the internal complexities of my role—the intellectual shift from technician to artisan—a storm broke from the outside world.
It arrived in the form of a case that, on the surface, was a dry dispute over administrative procedure.
An environmental agency had issued a sweeping new regulation on carbon emissions, and a coalition of industry groups had challenged it, arguing the agency had overstepped its statutory authority.
The case was a thicket of technical data and dueling interpretations of a decades-old statute.
But in the superheated political climate of the nation, it was a proxy for a much larger war over the economy, the environment, and the very role of government.
Our three-judge panel, after months of deliberation, issued a 2-1 decision upholding the agency’s regulation.
I wrote the majority opinion.
I believed then, and I believe now, that it was legally correct.
I grounded the decision in the plain text of the statute, the history of its enforcement, and established precedents on agency deference.
It was, I thought, a work of careful, restrained, and orthodox judicial reasoning.
The public reaction was immediate and volcanic.
Editorials denounced me as a “rogue judge” and an “unelected super-legislator”.24
Cable news commentators, few of whom could have read the 80-page opinion, confidently declared that I was a partisan hack, a “leftist” judge imposing my personal agenda.24
Members of Congress, whose predecessors had written the very law I was interpreting, called for my impeachment for the sin of disagreeing with their current policy preferences.24
The disrespect was not confined to the political arena; it seeped into the legal world itself.
In subsequent filings, I saw lawyers adopting a newly aggressive tone, their briefs laced with language that bordered on contempt for the rulings of trial judges they were appealing.25
It was as if a dam of civility had broken.
Then it became personal.
My home address was posted on a fringe website.
My email inbox filled with threats.
My clerks began screening my mail for anything suspicious.
I found myself living with a low-grade fear I had never known, a fear that judges like Esther Salas, whose family suffered an unspeakable tragedy, live with every day.24
I had to have conversations with my own family about security, about not answering the door, about “safe words”—a chilling intrusion of the dangers of the world into the sanctity of home.24
This experience forced me to confront the very foundation of my power as a judge.
What is it that makes a judicial order effective? I have no army to enforce my rulings, no power of the purse to compel compliance.
The authority of the judiciary, I came to understand with a terrifying clarity, is built on a fragile foundation of public trust and a shared belief in the rule of law.8
And that foundation was crumbling.
I was living through the crisis of judicial independence.
I felt the immense pressure of being part of what the Framers called the “counter-majoritarian branch,” the institution designed to protect the law and the rights of minorities from the passions of the majority.8
My job was to be unpopular when the law required it.
But what happens when the public and its political leaders no longer respect that role? What happens when they see judges not as impartial arbiters, but as “politicians in robes,” to be cheered when they rule your way and vilified when they don’t?26
The storm of criticism tested me in a way no complex legal puzzle ever could.
It was no longer an intellectual challenge; it was a test of character.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that judges must unite “fortitude to wisdom”.26
In the quiet of my chambers, surrounded by the vitriol of an angry nation, I had to decide if I possessed that fortitude.
I had to reaffirm my oath to uphold the Constitution, not as a matter of abstract philosophy, but as an act of courage in the face of a storm that threatened to wash away the very ground on which our democracy stands.
Part VI: The Inhabited Space: An Epiphany on Justice
Years passed.
The political storm over the emissions case eventually subsided, replaced by new controversies.
The “Matterhorn of paper” never shrank, but I learned to ski its slopes with a practiced, if weary, grace.
I had found my rhythm in the strange, cloistered world of the appellate judiciary.
One slow afternoon, I found myself pulling the file for an old case from my first year on the bench.
It was the drug trafficking conviction, the one where I had been forced by the “clearly erroneous” standard to affirm a result that felt deeply unjust.
I read my own notes from back then, full of frustration at the rigidness of the rule that had bound my hands.
But now, I saw the case with new eyes.
I still believed the trial judge had likely made a mistake.
But I also saw the wisdom, born of centuries of legal experience, behind the rule of deference.
I saw the value of finality in litigation.
I understood the institutional humility required in a system where the trial judge is the only one who sees the witness’s eyes, hears the tremor in their voice, and feels the atmosphere in the courtroom.
The tension I had experienced was not a flaw in the blueprint; it was a necessary and deliberate balancing of competing values—the desire for a correct outcome in a single case versus the need for a stable, predictable, and hierarchical judicial system.10
The rule wasn’t a cage; it was a guardrail.
My journey was complete.
I had started as a believer in the Law as Blueprint, a perfect and self-contained design.
I had been shattered by the messy reality of its construction.
I had learned the art of analogy and the necessity of compromise.
I had weathered the political storms that threaten to tear down the entire edifice.
And now, I had arrived at a new understanding, a final philosophy.
I no longer see the law as a pristine monument.
I see it as what the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown called a “Decorated Shed.” A shed is a simple, functional structure.
Its primary value is its utility—it keeps the rain out, it stores the tools.
This, I now believe, is the primary purpose of the law: its function, its utilitas.
It must resolve disputes, provide order, and serve the real-world needs of the people who live within it.
This is the essence of the legal pragmatism described by thinkers like Richard Posner—a relentless focus on the consequences of a judicial decision.27
But the structure is not just a plain shed.
It is decorated.
On its walls, we hang the principles, values, and aspirations of our society.
We paint murals of justice, equality, and due process.
This is the law’s venustas, its beauty.
This beauty is not found in mere logical elegance, but in its capacity for empathy, its reflection of our shared humanity, and its service to the cause of justice.28
This is the humanistic vision of judges like Guido Calabresi, who reminds us to consider the moral costs and hidden values in our legal choices, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who speaks of the “grit and grace” required to make the law’s promise real for everyone.29
My role, then, is not that of a master architect imposing a grand vision.
It is the far more humble role of a custodian and a city planner.
My job is to ensure the sheds are soundly built (firmitas), that they serve their inhabitants well (utilitas), and that the decorations we paint on them speak to our highest ideals (venustas).
I am not a visionary with a crusading bent.19
I am, as Judge Calabresi suggests, engaged in a constant “conversation”—with other courts, with the legislature, with the academy, with the public—in a slow, incremental effort to improve the law.31
I know now that I cannot command the arc of the moral universe.
But if, through a carefully reasoned opinion, a thoughtful analogy, or a courageous dissent, I can help bend it, even slightly, toward justice, then the work is worthwhile.32
The law is not perfect.
It is a human creation, and it is therefore flawed, contradictory, and perpetually unfinished.
But it is also our best hope for a just society.
My transformation from an architect of blueprints to a custodian of an inhabited city has stripped me of my certainty but given me something far more valuable: a measure of humility, and a reason for hope.
The Architecture of Law: A Transformational View
| Concept | Initial View (The Blueprint) | Evolved View (The Inhabited Space) |
| Structure (Firmitas) | The law is a rigid, perfectible set of rules. Procedural purity is an end in itself.7 | The law is a framework that must be strong but also flexible enough to adapt to human needs. Procedure serves substance.10 |
| Function (Utilitas) | The function is the logical application of rules to achieve a pre-ordained, correct result.9 | The function is to resolve disputes fairly, declare principles that promote a just society, and consider real-world consequences.12 |
| Form/Beauty (Venustas) | The “beauty” of law lies in its logical elegance, internal consistency, and the craftsmanship of the written opinion.15 | The “beauty” of law lies in its capacity for empathy, its reflection of communal values, and its service to humanity.12 |
| The Judge’s Role | A master architect, executing a perfect design with intellectual authority.34 | A city planner and custodian, humbly maintaining and adapting a living, evolving environment for its inhabitants.13 |
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