Most legal theory suffers from a tendency to underestimate the magnitude and im-portance of error costs. That tendency is a particular problem when it comes to legal regulation of street-level policing. Law enforcement and the law that regulates it does indeed function best when seen, as they should be, as "grown" rather than "made." And a great deal of legal theory instead treats policing and Fourth Amendment law as "made" systems. Most of what we would like that law to accomplish is impossible; the necessary legal judgments cannot be made with even a decent degree of accuracy. When regulating street policing, we are living in a land of bad choices.
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