The realists knew what to do-think things not words, trace the actual consequences of legal doctrines, balance competing policies-but they didn't have a clue as to how to do any of these things. It was not their fault. The tools of economics, statistics, and other pertinent sciences were insufficiently developed to enable a social-engineering approach to be taken to law.

XREF: Connects to the history of legal realism and its relationship to later movements like law-and-economics, which supplied the missing quantitative toolkit. Builds on: "Newtonian physics inspired a mechanical view of human nature."

Richard A. Posner, Richard A. Posner - What Ha…, loc. 55