I’ve suggested before that the 19th century legal scholar Christopher Columbus Langdell is often unfairly caricatured as one who saw law as a formal science following absolute principles. Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha looks at similar caricatures on the other end of the spectrum in a very interesting post, Popular Myths About the Legal Realists. Putting the two together suggests that the realists caricatured Langdell and then were in turn caricatured by others, leading to two caricatures that are very popular but might not have much grounding in reality.