Customer Reviews

American Legal Realism

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Periodically, interest seems to rekindle in the Legal Realist movement of the 1930's. Most recently, Wouter de Been, a Dutch scholar, has written "Legal Realism Regained: Saving Realism from Critical Acclaim" (reviewed on Amazon). This group of legal scholars who sought to reorient our thinking toward the nature and role of law, legal reasoning, law and the social science, and the role of legal language includes many names still familiar today: Jermone Frank, Karl Llewellyn, Felix Cohen, William O. Douglas, Max Radin, Thurman Arnold and many, many more. The Legal Realists are usually a topic in political science and law school courses on legal philosophy and legal history. This reader is designed to complement these courses and to make key material much more easily accessible. Following a brief introduction to the topic, eight chapters focusing on different aspects of the Realists. Each chapter has its own brief introduction by the editors. And important topics are the focus of these chapters: antecedents (Holmes, Pound, Hohfeld); struggle over meaning (Pound, Llewellyn); contracts (Corbin); the "public/private distinction" (Hale, Jaffe, Cohen); legal reasoning (Hutcheson, Dewey, Cardozo, and Frank); law and social science (Brandeis, Hoebel, Cook, and Moore); and finally legal education and scholarship (Oliphant, Arnold and Rodell). Like any reader, this one suffers from some structural problems: the introductions are concise and not extensive; the articles (while being some of the most important examples of Realism) are limited to extracts; and one can always quibble that too much space was given to certain articles and insufficient extracts are included for others. But all in all, this is a very fine collection. Each introduction has footnoted additional references, and there is a fine bibliography although somewhat dated since the book was compiled in 1993. This book will remain of great value as long as the topic of Legal Realism is alive and kicking.