Courts usually have as much interpretive leeway to construe facts asthey do legal rules. It is well recognized that courts can characterize facts in radically different ways to make one rule application rather than another seem appropriate or unavoidable. Interpretation of either facts or law can change the case outcome, and both processes are laden with subjective judgments. Moreover, these two interpretive processes are interdependent. How we construe facts will affect the meaning we give to rules–especially broad standards–and the normative content inherent in applying the language of rules will influence the facts we look for and find.

Scholars and practitioners know more about the complexity and importance of factual interpretation than has traditionally been reflected in law school curricula. Fact development has tremendous utility in practice. It is what many lawyers spend much of their time doing, and it can make orbreak a case as quickly as a rule interpretation. It is also an analytically complex project that implicates many of the same problems of social contingency and purposive construction that rule interpretation does. In light of this, it is somewhat odd that law schools have traditionally given much more attention to legal analysis than factual analysis. This has gradually changed in recent years, as schools have developed courses in pre-trial litigation and fact investigation, and have implemented legal process courses of broader scope.