[Avodah] Contextual Factors

[Joel Rich]

>From a book re: Dr. Jacob Katz:
He had learned from his training in history and in the sociology of
knowledge that the critical variable involved in an analysis of a legal
holding was not determining whether that decision had a precedent. Katz
knew that the author of such a ruling frequently had a welter of rules and
principles that were capable of providing guidance in a given case. Rather,
the point was to focus on the contextual factors that led an author to
select one precedent over another, or to indicate what the concerns were
that caused that author to reformulate precedents in a novel way. In this
instance, Katz emphasized the innovative argument Hirsch used to combine
precedents and contemporary language to reconfigure the tradition.

Me-this resonated with my thoughts based on empirical observation. Yours?


KT
Joel Rich
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