It makes me into a mindless functionary instead of a brilliant intellectual. We tried backing off a step and finding philosophical principles that would explain law on a more general level. But our society is too diverse to find consistent results even at this level. Indeed, that diversity has now reached into courtrooms, so that we have judges of far more varied religions, attitudes, races, training, etc. than we used to have. But diversity is not all bad.
Diversity just makes it harder for judges ever to reach agreement on some things.
But this is mostly irrelevant for those who aren t sure we should have a judiciary at all or that it should function remotely like ours now does. Judges, like many nonlawyers, simply rely on their own sense of what s best. It is frequently impossible for a judge to show that he has reached the right decision. A judge in a difficult case can hope, at most, just to reach a reasonable decision, and it becomes harder even to seem reasonable to fellow judges when they re all so different from one another. Often, you get big changes in the law merely because many judges attitudes somehow change or change back to what they were before for reasons that no one seems able to explain.