The reasonable man is an anthropomorphic metaphor for legal reasoning. In this role, he sometimes shows symptoms of mental illness. He exhibits a compulsion to organize, rank, and prevent disorder, a process that can create unjust outcomes. When he is symptomatic, the reasonable man becomes a monster borne out of a fear of disorder. As the putative judge whom all lawyers write and speak in front of, the reasonable man is the reader attorneys fine-tune their arguments and language for.
After developing a case history for the reasonable man, this Article engages with several questions. First, when advocates emulate the reasonable man’s white, privileged, patrimonial, and no-nonsense approach to legal reasoning, are they nurturing a monster? Second, do advocates reinforce inequality by adopting the reasonable man’s privileged persona and formalist approach to legal reasoning? And finally, if the reasonable man sometimes exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder, can our law and culture heal him?
