Legal reasoning is not deductive. Rules aren't true or false and can't be related among themselves or to statements of fact, and therefore you can't talk of consistency or contradiction.

inductive/deductive

Courts refer to the past to discover rules and to justify their acceptance as valid. Past cases are said to have “authority” for the rules “extracted” from them.

“For any given precedent there are logically an indefinite number of alternative general rules which can satisfy the condition.” ... Not matters of logic but substantive matters ... Case to case, by example ... resembles ... makes use of the past as a precedent without first extracting from it and formulating any general rule. ... still falsifyable by future experience. ... It is impossible in framing general rules to anticipate and provide for every possible combination of circumstances which the future may bring. ... they are never bound to do so: they always are free to decide otherwise than they do. ... These do not mean that courts are to decide arbitrarily without elaborating reasons for their decisions--and still less that any legal system authorizes decisions of this kind. ... judges marshall in support of their decisions a plurality of considerations ... forced to balance or weigh them and to determine priorities ... it is still meaningful to speak of a decision as THE uniquely correct decision ... the duty of the judge to discover it. ... preference does not become rational because it is deferred until after the judge has considered the factors that weigh for and against it. ... agree that many decisions can be clearly ruled out as incorrect. ... another equally skilled and impartial judge might choose another alternative. ... its felt involuntary or even inevitable character which often marks the termination of deliberation. ... “natural.”

Judicial process sometimes criticized as formal, mechanical, automatic.

Logic does not determine the interpretation of words or the scope of classifications. ... conventions of the legal use of words, which may diverge from their common use ... which itself may be either explicitly stated or generally agreed.

Reasoned, prioritized, discovered, opinionated