Daily Inspiration Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

“Law is a formless mass of isolated decisions” lands like a provocation aimed at legal romanticism. Cohen, a philosopher with a pragmatist streak, is puncturing the comforting story that law is a coherent, almost scientific system whose rules reliably generate outcomes. “Formless” doesn’t mean “random” so much as “retrospectively organized”: the appearance of order is often something we impose after the fact, by stitching together precedents into a narrative that feels principled.

The line also targets a professional habit. Judges decide; lawyers argue; then everyone dresses the result in doctrine. Calling the raw material “isolated decisions” highlights how much of law is built from case-by-case dispute resolution, shaped by local facts, personalities, and institutional pressures. The subtext is skeptical but not nihilistic: Cohen isn’t denying that law has rules, he’s warning that rules are thinner than we pretend, and that their unity is a rhetorical achievement. Coherence is manufactured through interpretation, selective emphasis, and the prestige of precedent.

Context matters: Cohen wrote in an era when American legal realism was challenging formalism, insisting that outcomes can’t be explained by syllogism alone. His phrasing sides with the realists’ suspicion that “the law” is less a timeless code than a pile of accreted judgments, with contradictions papered over by appellate storytelling. The jab remains current because it names the thing people still want to forget: legal certainty is often a style of writing, not a feature of reality.