There’s no such thing as a "perfect" legal ruling because being right actually requires the permanent possibility that you might be wrong.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
The Impossibility of Normative Closure
SSRN · 6264340
The Takeaway
We often strive for a final, error-free legal system, but logic suggests that's impossible. For a decision to truly count as a 'judgment,' it must remain open to reassessment; otherwise, it’s just a mechanical rule rather than an act of wisdom.
From the abstract
Judgment is ordinarily understood as an operation that achieves stability by excluding error. This paper argues that such completion is impossible in principle. Here, "judgment" denotes rule-governed evaluation in which correct and incorrect applications are distinguishable. An operation counts as judgment only insofar as the correctness of its rule application remains assessable. If reassessability were eliminated, the distinction between correct and incorrect application would collapse, and th