Formalism And Pragmatism In American Law

In Formalism and Pragmatism in American Law Thomas Grey gives a full account of each of these modes of legal thought, with particular attention to the versions of them promulgated by their influential exponents Christopher Columbus Langdell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Grey argues that legal pragmatism as understood by Holmes is the best jurisprudential framework for a modern legal system. He enriches his theoretical account with treatments of central issues in three important areas of law in the United States: constitutional interpretation, property, and torts.

A liberal state is a representative democracy constrained by the rule of law. Richard Posner argues for a conception of the liberal state based on pragmatic theories of government. He views the actions of elected officials as guided by interests rather than by reason and the decisions of judges by discretion rather than by rules. He emphasizes the institutional and material, rather than moral and deliberative, factors in democratic decision making. Posner argues that democracy is best viewed as a competition for power by means of regular elections. Citizens should not be expected to play a significant role in making complex public policy regarding, say, taxes or missile defense. The great advantage of democracy is not that it is the rule of the wise or the good but that it enables stability and orderly succession in government and limits the tendency of rulers to enrich or empower themselves to the disadvantage of the public. Posner’s theory steers between political theorists’ concept of deliberative democracy on the left and economists’ public-choice theory on the right. It makes a significant contribution to the theory of democracy—and to the theory of law as well, by showing that the principles that inform Schumpeterian democratic theory also inform the theory and practice of adjudication. The book argues for law and democracy as twin halves of a pragmatic theory of American government.

This book undertakes a systematic analysis of the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention, the 2005 Hague Choice of Court Convention 2005, and the 2017 Commonwealth Model Law on recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments from a pragmatic perspective. The book builds on the concept of pragmatism in private international law within the context of recognition and enforcement of judgments. It demonstrates the practical application of legal pragmatism by setting up a toolbox (pragmatic goals and methods) that will assist courts and policymakers in developing an effective and efficient judgments' enforcement scheme at national, bilateral and multilateral levels. Practitioners, national courts, policymakers, academics, students and litigants will benefit from the book's comparative approach using case law from the United Kingdom and other leading Commonwealth States, the United States, and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The book also provides interesting findings from the empirical research on the refusal of recognition and enforcement in the UK and the Commonwealth statutory registration schemes respectively.

This work represents a serious and philosophically sophisticated guide to modern American legal theory, demonstrating that legal positivism has been a misunderstood and underappreciated perspective through most of twentieth-century American legal thought.

This book argues for a three-dimensional view of law and restates the message of Holmes's 'The Path of the Law' for legal educators of today.

Adopting an evolutionary perspective, this Research Handbook presents novel and cutting-edge insights into the interdisciplinary field of legal evolution. Engaging with various scientific approaches, it provides a versatile analysis of legal evolution, examining the field as a whole as well as in the context of specific branches of law.

In this book, one of our country’s most distinguished scholar-judges shares with us his vision of the law. For the past two thousand years, the philosophy of law has been dominated by two rival doctrines. One contends that law is more than politics and yields, in the hands of skillful judges, correct answers to even the most difficult legal questions; the other contends that law is politics through and through and that judges wield essentially arbitrary powers. Rejecting these doctrines as too metaphysical in the first instance and too nihilistic in the second, Richard Posner argues for a pragmatic jurisprudence, one that eschews formalism in favor of the factual and the empirical. Laws, he argues, are not abstract, sacred entities, but socially determined goads for shaping behavior to conform with society’s values. Examining how judges go about making difficult decisions, Posner argues that they cannot rely on either logic or science, but must fall back on a grab bag of informal methods of reasoning that owe less than one might think to legal training and experience. Indeed, he reminds us, the greatest figures in American law have transcended the traditional conceptions of the lawyer’s craft. Robert Jackson did not attend law school and Benjamin Cardozo left before getting a degree. Holmes was neither the most successful of lawyers nor the most lawyerly of judges. Citing these examples, Posner makes a plea for a law that frees itself from excessive insularity and takes all knowledge, practical and theoretical, as grist for its mill. The pragmatism that Posner espouses implies looking at problems concretely, experimentally, without illusions, with an emphasis on keeping diverse paths of inquiry open, and, above all, with the insistence that social thought and action be evaluated as instruments to desired human goals rather than as ends in themselves. In making his arguments, he discusses notable figures in jurisprudence from Antigone to Ronald Dworkin as well as recent movements ranging from law and economics to civic republicanism, and feminism to libertarianism. All are subjected to Posner’s stringent analysis in a fresh and candid examination of some of the deepest problems presented by the enterprise of law.