44 Mark Washofsky

and if that choice is not determined by a value-neutral halakhic method, then halakhah is nothing more than the will of the posek(his “will” in the sense that the choice depends upon his own moral and cultural proclivities, his subjective sense of“which view will better serve the community”). Yet we tend to think of halakhah, as of law in general, as something other than the judge’s will, as something other than politics or ethics or economics; in short, the law“is claimed to be its own thing and not entirely reducible to anything else.” Law, precisely because it“wishes to have a formal existence,” demands its own rules and procedures by which it can speak in its own unique language and arrive at its conclusions in its own autonomous fashion.* This is the sense in which legal method understands itself as “value-neutral”:“the law is an order, and therefore all legal problems must be set and solved as order problems. In this way legal theory becomes an exact structural analysis of positive law, free of all ethical - political value judgments.”® This is not to imply that legal decision is a purely mechanical affair in which the judge, in oracular fashion,” pronounces the ruling that is dictated by the controlling forces of law’s immanent logic. Law is not mathematics or a“hard” science.. As with any activity that demands interpretation, the determination of legal meaning cannot aspire to the clear-cut correctness that is the outcome of a syllogism or an equation. The formality of law does mean, however, that the act of interpretation is constrained by means of the“disciplining rules” of legal analysis that, by directing the judge’s inquiry along the proper path, insure that his decision is objectively correct.” Such a formal approach safeguards the rule of law, which holds that decision makers should wield power in a community not in accordance with personal whim or even with deeply held personal conviction but with previously agreed upon rules and standards.” Law is law, and nothing other than law. To say otherwise, to deny law its status as a self-authenticating process, is to herald“the death of the law” by assimilating it into some other discipline or disciplines.” And if this is so, then we have entered the universe of

A UBB

at li.