In the context of Chinese legal culture, as Liang Shu-ming accounts, human reason as a faculty of finding truth, judging right or wrong, has been sought to be embedded within law traditionally. It is by relying upon this human faculty that the sense of right and wrong transcends itself to connect with the deepest level of sources of law, i.e., the Heaven Principle or Way of Heaven (universal principles of heaven) and human feeling by which beliefs could be proved right or wrong. Also, it is relied upon this human faculty that law can be rethought from its basic principles, and its huge body would be reorganized along the lines of these principles. In addition, through this process universal reason and historical facts are combined together in grounding law. If law shares the nature of the world and of life, then this way of transcendence demonstrates an ultimate concern and basic principle around which the Chinese legal culture orients itself towards the end of creating a social order, of perfecting a human life, and of comforting the human mind.
As early as in 1865, while still at the Harvard Law School, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., seems to have understood that he would create a dynamic intellectual autobiography in the law. "What he cared about," explains Felix Frankfurter much later, "was transforming thought." By quoting this, an American lawyer remarked that Holmes' success is one more indication, to use the language of cultural anthropology, " that legal thought is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them."