The dominant social scientific approach to studying judicial behavior treats judges as strategic actors pursuing their political preferences under institutional constraint. The intellectual roots of this rational choice approach are in American law’s long but sporadic engagement with pragmatist ideas. This article challenges that approach: a fully pragmatist account of judicial action provides a better description of the intellectual and social work of judging, and better explains how judges reach a decision in difficult cases that most affect the development of law and its relationship to society. The article argues that the foundational intellectual problem for appellate judges is how to define the legal questions presented in a case. Definitions of legal questions arise from the interplay of habitual and creative action in the local social context of an appeals court. Professional and local interpretive habits and legal forms ordinarily do a great deal to define the key questions, which are not strictly determined when a case comes before a court. Unscripted small group interactions at oral arguments also figure in question definition; oral arguments are most important in the rare but legally important cases where habitual practices alone are insufficient to delimit the legal question judges must answer. Supported by extensive interviews with federal appeals judges and clerks, the article illustrates judges’ creative, interactional efforts to define an answerable question in a major asylum case decided in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Building from this case, the article describes the factors that shape judicial question definition, and describes the conditions when creative judicial action is likely to be most prominent.

研究司法行为的主流社会科学方法将法官视为在制度约束下追求其政治偏爱的战略参与者。这种理性选择方法的思想渊源在于美国法律长期而零星地参与实用主义思想。本文对这种方法提出了挑战：对司法行动的全面实用主义描述，可以更好地描述法官的智力和社会工作，并且可以更好地解释法官如何在最能影响法律发展及其与社会关系的困难案件中做出决定。文章认为，上诉法官的基本智力问题是如何定义案件中提出的法律问题。法律问题的定义源于上诉法院在当地社会环境中习惯性行为和创造性行为的相互作用。通常，专业和当地的解释习惯和法律形式在确定关键问题上起着很大作用，关键问题在案件提交法院审理时并不能严格确定。口头辩论中未经脚本编写的小组互动也会在问题定义中体现出来；在罕见但具有法律重要性的案件中，口头辩论是最重要的，在这些案件中，仅习惯做法不足以界定法官必须回答的法律问题。在对联邦上诉法官和文员进行的广泛采访的支持下，本文说明了法官在第七巡回上诉法院裁定的重大庇护案件中为定义可回答问题做出的创造性互动工作。从这个案例开始，