If it were, the indiscreet action of one court might become a precedent, increasing in weight with each successive adjudication, until the whole country was tied down to an unsound principle.
But Prichard says that there is nothing much wrong with the original reasoning, and that the expanded version is actually worse, since it appeals to an unsound principle, that what is good ought to be.
That is, he repeatedly invokes the alluring, but fundamentally unsound, principle that simple ideas about forecasting and prediction from one field, like economics, can readily be appropriated and applied to completely different fields, without a solid grounding in the principles, assumptions, and methods of those fields.
Although the physics turns out to be unsound, the Principles nevertheless inspired such great thinkers as Robert Boyle (1627 1691), Edmond Halley (1656 1742), and Isaac Newton.
Any moral mistake in the reasoning leading to a legal principle might render the conclusion about the principle unsound, and the principle itself thus not legally valid.
In my opinion, this decision is at variance with the long-established practice under the statutes of the States of this Union, is unsound in principle, and, I fear, may be disastrous in its effects.
In deciding whether to depart from a prior decision, one relevant consideration is whether the decision is "unsound in principle". Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528, 546, 105 S.Ct.
We also rejected as "unsound in principle and unworkable in practice" any test for state immunity that requires a judicial determination of which state activities are "traditional," "integral," or "necessary". Garcia, supra, 469 U.S., at 546, 105 S.Ct., at 1015.
In its pristine formulation, an increasing number of courts have rejected the principle as unsound.
The principle is unsound because the idea of 'ought to be' does not make sense; what makes sense is 'I ought to do it'.
Every candidate has principles, whether sound or unsound, informed or uninformed, moral or immoral, realistic or bizarre.
