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.