Doctor Arbuthnot was not far short of the mark: ‘Law is a bottomless pit.’ It is capable of accommodating all manner of philosophical insight, ideological choice, and hermeneutical possibility. In the three centuries existential reality. With a hubris worthy of the pharaohs, they have sought to shape the legal pit in their own philosophical image. Their goal has been to construct, or to discover, a solid jurisprudential foundation on which to erect their legal edifices. Sometimes they claim to have succeeded. But inevitably the foundation collapses, like a false bottom, disclosing the political chasms beneath.
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Hutchinson et al. (1988) studied this question.