Legal realists famously argued that appellate opinions are best understood as post-hoc rationalizations of decisions reached on other grounds, with doctrinal reasoning serving to justify rather than to generate outcomes. A common rebuttal observes that if this were entirely true, we would expect judges' stated reasoning to track their personal or political priors far more closely than empirical studies actually find; many judges rule against their apparent priors in a substantial minority of cases, particularly where precedent is unambiguous. This rebuttal, however, understates its own force by treating the realist thesis as all-or-nothing. A more precise formulation, consistent with both the studies and realist insight, holds that doctrinal reasoning constrains outcomes at the margins, narrowing the set of decisions a judge can plausibly justify, even while priors do meaningful work in selecting among the outcomes that remain doctrinally available.