It takes a long process of what Mr. Justice Miller used to call judicial inclusion and exclusion to justify you in being certain that you have hold of something so general, so universal, so capable of dealing with questions of that type that you can say here is an authoritative starting point for legal reasoning in all analogous cases.

Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide …, loc. 134