Question

In late nineteenth-century American jurisprudence, the doctrine of legal formalism posited that adjudication was an essentially deductive enterprise. Formalists conceived of the common law as a comprehensive, gapless, and internally consistent taxonomy of objective principles. Under this paradigm, the judicial function was strictly mechanical: a judge applied pre-existing, axiomatic rules to the idiosyncratic facts of a case to deduce a uniquely correct legal outcome, entirely insulated from subjective moral intuitions or the prevailing political zeitgeist. In the 1920s, the legal realist movement emerged as a trenchant repudiation of this orthodox view. The realists contended that broad legal principles were inherently indeterminate and sufficiently malleable to logically sustain multiple, often contradictory, outcomes. Consequently, realists argued that a judge's ultimate ruling was rarely the inevitable consequence of deductive logic. Instead, the ruling was typically an ex post facto rationalization of a preferred outcome—an outcome subconsciously dictated by the judge’s own socioeconomic background, psychological disposition, and policy predilections. For the realists, the formalist veneer of deductive objectivity merely functioned to obfuscate the inherently political nature of judicial power.

It can be most reasonably inferred from the passage that which one of the following hypothetical scenarios would represent a significant theoretical anomaly for the legal realists while conforming precisely to the fundamental expectations of legal formalism?