In accepting the inevitability and strategic or long-term desirability of some number of mistakes of mostly the right kind, the legal system's use of burdens of proof, presumptions, standards of review, and principles of deference, perhaps especially the last, resembles the system's use of rules and precedents, and resembles the legal system's at least partial commitment to formality. It may also resemble the legal system's willingness to make decisions on the basis of less than all of the best or available information. In all of these dimensions, the law, more than many other decision-making institutions, commits itself to accepting wrong or at least suboptimal answers, and it does so in the service of larger or longerterm institutional values, as well as service to the idea that the best way to get the largest number of correct decisions in the long term is often something other than attempting to make the best decision on every occasion. In operating in this way, law and legal reasoning may not be different in kind from other decision-making institutions, but they may differ in degree. At the heart of much of law's use of its characteristic reasoning devices is its acceptance of the fact that the best decision is not always the best legal decision.

Unknown, Frederick Schauer - Thinkin…, loc. 431