Question

In late nineteenth-century American jurisprudence, legal formalism prevailed as the dominant orthodox paradigm. Formalists conceptualized the law as a conceptually autonomous, logically closed system. According to this view, judicial decision-making was a purely deductive exercise: judges merely applied pre-existing, objective legal rules to the specific facts of a case to yield an inevitable conclusion. By the 1920s, however, a movement known as Legal Realism emerged to challenge this paradigm. Leading realists, such as Karl Llewellyn, argued that the formalist model fundamentally misunderstood the nature of judicial behavior.

Llewellyn famously distinguished between "paper rules"—the traditional doctrinal rules found in statutes and judicial opinions—and "real rules." He contended that paper rules rarely constrained judges in the manner formalists claimed. Because legal doctrine is often ambiguous or contradictory, a judge can typically find precedent to support multiple outcomes in any given dispute. Consequently, Llewellyn argued, decisions are often driven by extra-legal factors, such as the judge’s socio-economic background, unstated policy preferences, or a desire for a pragmatic outcome, with the formal paper rule serving merely as a post-hoc rationalization.

Crucially, however, Llewellyn did not assert that paper rules were entirely irrelevant. He acknowledged that traditional doctrine could establish broad boundaries within which judicial discretion operates. Yet, to understand how the law actually functions, Llewellyn argued that scholars must look beyond the doctrine to identify "real rules"—empirical generalizations based on the observation of how courts actually decide cases in specific factual contexts, regardless of the doctrinal justifications appended to those decisions.

Based on the passage, which of the following can be most reasonably inferred about Llewellyn’s view regarding ambiguous or contradictory legal doctrine?