Tradition
Legal realism
Overview
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law; it is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science; that is, it should rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world.
Legal realists believe that legal science should only investigate law with the value-free methods of natural sciences, rather than through philosophical inquiries into the nature and meaning of the law that are separate and distinct from the law as it is actually practiced. Indeed, legal realism asserts that the law cannot be separated from its application, nor can it be understood outside of its application. As such, legal realism emphasizes law as it actually exists, rather than law as it ought to be. Locating the meaning of law in places such as legal opinions issued by judges and their deference to or dismissal of precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis, it stresses the importance of understanding the factors involved in judicial decision-making.
In Scandinavia Axel Hägerström developed another realist tradition that was influential in European jurisprudential circles for most of the 20th century.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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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 realism is.
(1) The systems which defend the Idealism of final causes in nature grant, it is true, on the one hand to their principle a causality in accordance with the laws of motion (through which [causality] natural things exist purposively); but they deny to it _intentionality_, _i.e._ that it designedly determines itself to this its purposive production; in other words, they deny that the cause is a purpose. This is…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Legal realism is.
The reign of law in nature is the work of the same reason which proceeds empirically and haltingly to the discovery of law here and there. Thus the acceptance of the Kantian philosophy not only frees man at a single stroke from superstition, sentimentalism and moral and theological romanticism, but gives at the same stroke authorization and stimulation to…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
The author is tied to Legal realism in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Legal realism
- Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Robert Maynard Hutchins
- Axel Hägerström
- Robert S. Summers
- Alf Ross
Related ideas
- John Dewey
- Jurisprudence
- Law
- Natural law
- Precedent
- Brian Leiter
- Ronald Dworkin
- Empirical evidence
- H. L. A. Hart
- Natural science
- Naturalism (philosophy)
- Yale Law School
- Syllogism
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- Roscoe Pound
- Pragmatism
- Morris Raphael Cohen
- The Concept of Law
- Sociology of law
- Axel Hägerström
- Karl Llewellyn
Place in the tradition
Part of Jurisprudence.