In Adams, the question was the nature of the responsibility of the owner of a steamboat with sleeping compartments to an overnight passenger whose money had been stolen when, allegedly through the company's negligence, a burglar broke into the plaintiff's sleeping compartment. What makes the case interesting is that two divergent bodies of law were both potentially applicable. If the law pertaining to open sleeping compartments in railroad cars was applicable, then the company would not have been liable, but if the law pertaining to innkeepers applied, then the plaintiff would have been able to recover. The question was then whether the steamboat with closed passenger cabins was more like a railroad sleeping car or more like a hotel. … But in deciding that the steamboat was more like a hotel than a railroad sleeping car, the response to the skeptical challenge would go, the court did not first imagine what, on the basis of policy or principle, the best rule would be and then determine similarity on that basis. Rather, it looked at the two possibilities and simply "saw" more of a similarity in one direction than another. This might in theory have been reducible to some rule, but the rule did not consciously exist in the minds of the judges at the time they identified the similarity, so in fact for the judges the identification of similarity was a primary mental activity.

Unknown, Frederick Schauer - Thinkin…, loc. 183