"Judging cannot be described as an art or a craft since all a judgedoes is follow precedent and apply the law to the facts of the case

... "Judging cannot be described as an art or a craft since all a judge does is follow precedent and apply the law to the facts of the case. Discuss. One does not mean that precedents are ultimate sources of the law, supplying the sole equipment that is needed for the legal armory, the sole tools, to borrow Maitland's phrase"in the legal smithy." Back of precedents are the basic juridical conceptions which are the postulates of judicial reasoning, and farther back are the habits of life, the institutions of society, in which those conceptions had their origin, and which, by a process of interaction, they have modified in turn. None the less, in a system so highly developed as the English system, precedents have so covered the ground that they fix the point of departure from which the labor of the judge begins. Almost invariably, his first step is to examine and

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