Author(s)

Luiz Fernando Eng de Lima

Civil Procedure at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

This article examines how legal pragmatism, grounded in Charles Sanders Peirce’s abductive reasoning and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s consequentialist perspective, offers an anti-essentialist alternative to formalist models of judicial decision-making. It seeks to show how pragmatism redefines the relationship between norm, fact, and context, and elevates precedent to a dynamic source of law. The article adopts a normative-theoretical design, based on comparative doctrinal analysis of Brazilian civil law traditions and common law pragmatist thought. The article aims to analyze the adaptive role of precedents as hermeneutic tools rather than static links to the past, to verify if, by adopting a pragmatist approach, courts can maintain legal certainty while ensuring adaptability, thereby promoting a legal system that is more responsive to social complexity and capable of overcoming the limits of formalism.

Abduction, Legal Pragmatism, Consequentialism, Precedents, Charles Sanders Peirce

de Lima, L. F. E. (2025) Legal Pragmatism and the Overcoming of Formalism: Abduction, Precedents and Contextualization in the Judicial Decision. Beijing Law Review, 16, 1920-1933. doi: 10.4236/blr.2025.163097.