Legal realists, like judge and University of Chicago professor Richard Posner, argue that Supreme Court jurisprudence is never the exercise in formal rule following that Scalia says it is: Most of the cases the Supreme Court agrees to decide are toss-ups, in the sense that they cannot be decided by conventional legal reasoning, with its heavy reliance on constitutional and statutory language and previous decisions. If they could be decided by those essentially semantic methods, they would be resolved uncontroversially at the level of a state supreme court or federal court of appeals and never
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