Method
Legal formalism
Overview
Legal formalism is both a descriptive theory of how judges decide cases and a normative theory of how judges should decide cases. In its descriptive sense, formalists maintain that judges reach their decisions by applying uncontroversial principles to the facts; formalists believe that there is an underlying logic to the many legal principles that may be applied in different cases. These principles, they claim, are straightforward and can be readily discovered by anyone with some legal expertise. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., by contrast, believed that "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". The formalist era is generally viewed as having existed from the 1870s to the 1920s, but some scholars deny that legal formalism ever existed in practice.
The ultimate goal of legal formalism would be to describe the underlying principles in a single and determinate system that could be applied mechanically—from which the term "mechanical jurisprudence" comes. Judge Richard Posner defined "legal formalism" as "the use of deductive logic to derive the outcome of a case from premises accepted as authoritative". The antithesis of formalism is legal realism, which has been said to be "[p]erhaps the most pervasive and accepted theory of how judges arrive at legal decisions."
This descriptive conception of "legal formalism" can be extended to a normative theory, which holds that judges should decide cases by the application of uncontroversial principles to the facts; "sound legal
decisions can be justified as the conclusions of valid deductive syllogisms."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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However, practical rules of this kind are not called laws (like physical laws), but only precepts; because the will does not stand merely under the natural concept, but also under the concept of freedom, in relation to which its principles are called laws. These with their consequences alone constitute the second or practical part of Philosophy.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Legal formalism is.
We wish, as it were, to see the matter double, first in its immediacy, and secondly in its ground, where it is no longer immediate. This is the plain meaning of the law of sufficient ground, as it is called; it asserts that things should essentially be viewed as mediated. The manner in which Formal Logic establishes this law of thought, sets a bad example to other sciences. Formal Logic asks these sciences not to…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Legal formalism is.
Now, if no other determining principle can serve as a law for the will except that universal legislative form, such a will must be conceived as quite independent of the natural law of phenomena in their mutual relation, namely, the law of causality; such independence is called freedom in the strictest, that is, in the transcendental, sense; consequently, a will which can have its law in nothing but the mere…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
States what Legal formalism is.
Related ideas
- Executive (government)
- Georg Henrik von Wright
- Deontic logic
- Human rights
- Jurisprudence
- Justice
- Law
- Case law
- Richard Posner
- Brian Leiter
- Instrumentalism
- Separation of powers
- Legal realism
- Constitution of the United States
- Supreme Court of the United States
- Legislature
- Syllogism
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Antithesis
- Jan Woleński
- Imperative logic
Place in the tradition
Part of Jurisprudence.