Pragmatism remains a powerful antidote to formalism, which is enjoying a resurgence in the Supreme Court. Legal formalism is the idea that legal questions can be answered by inquiry into the relation between concepts and hence without need for more than a superficial examination of their relation to the world of fact. It is, therefore, anti-pragmatic as well as anti-empirical. It asks not, What works?, but instead, What rules and outcomes have a proper pedigree in the form of a chain of logical links to an indisputably authoritative source of law, such as the text of the United States Constitution? Those rules and outcomes are correct and the rest incorrect. Formalism is the domain of the logician, the casuist, the Thomist, the Talmudist.

XREF: Connects to legal theory debates between pragmatism, empiricism, and textualism in constitutional interpretation.

Richard A. Posner, Richard A. Posner - What Ha…, loc. 90