a judge's freedom to innovate is insignificant “compared with the bulk and pressure of the rules that hedge him on every side.” In claiming that judges do and must make law, Cardozo was siding with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Roscoe Pound, John Chipman Gray, and other American “proto-realists” of his day who were challenging the traditional “oracular” or “mechanical” or “formalist” view of judicial reasoning. On that view, judges never make law, they simply discover pre-existing law and apply it. According to strict formalists, there are no hard cases where the law is silent, or ambiguous, or vague, or contradictory, or couched in broad generalities. Rather, the law is clear, consistent, and complete; all legal questions have a single correct answer; and judges are (in Blackstone's phrase) “living oracles” who deduce inexorable legal conclusions from indisputable legal axioms. Formalism was not Cardozo's only target in The Nature of the Judicial Process. He also attacked radical critics of formalism, such as John Chipman Gray, who claimed that judges have immense freedom and rejected the very idea of law as a set of binding rules. Gray and other proto-realists of the time tried to demystify law and view it with hard-headed pragmatism. They argued that since judges are the ultimate arbiters of law, “law” in the final analysis is whatever judges say it is (or what they predictably will say it is in the future). Cardozo argued that this isn't an “analysis” of law, but a denial that any true law exists. The proto-realists confuse right with power. Judges may have the power to ignore settle legal standards, but they do not have the right. Moreover, the attempt to identify law with judicial rulings ignores the fact that the great majority of legal questions have clear, uncontroversial answers that guide everyday conduct and are never litigated in courts. Reception and influence The Nature of the Judicial Process established Cardozo “as one of the leading jurists of his time” and “has become a classic of legal education." Its continuing appeal is due, in part, to its self-effacing tone, its lapidary prose, and its attempt to strike a happy medium between legal formalism and radical realist theories that wholly reject traditional views of law, legal reasoning, judicial restraint, and the rule of law. The great success of Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial Process created demand for further reflections on the law. In two