Towards A Realistic Jurisprudence

Based on ... my ... 'Virkelighed og gyldighed i retslaeren.'

First published in 1973, Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement is a classic account of American Legal Realism and its leading figure. Karl Llewellyn is the best known and most substantial jurist of the group of lawyers known as the American Realists. He made important contributions to legal theory, legal sociology, commercial law, contract law, civil liberties and legal education. This intellectual biography sets Llewellyn in the broad context of the rise of the American Realist Movement and contains an overview of his life before focusing on his most important works, including The Cheyenne Way, The Bramble Bush, The Common Law Tradition and the Uniform Commercial Code. In this second edition the original text is supplemented with a preface by Frederick Schauer and an afterword in which William Twining gives a fascinating account of the making of the book and comments on developments in relevant legal scholarship over the past forty years.

The book re-orients jurisprudence and develops an empirically informed theory of law that applies throughout history and across different societies.

Ross, Alf. On Law and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. xi, 383 pp. Reprint available December 2004 by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-488-6. Cloth. $90. * In this influential and oft-cited study Ross discounted the theories of natural law, positivism and legal realism. In their stead, he proposed the abandonment of "ought-propositions" for the "is-propositions" employed by other empirical sciences, thereby envisioning lawyers that serve merely as "rational technologists." Less bound by tradition, and traditional notions of justice, jurisprudence then becomes "not only a beautiful mental activity per se, but also an instrument which may benefit any lawyer who wants to understand what he is doing and why" (Preface).

Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice compiles many of Llewellyn's most important writings. For his time, the thirties through the fifties, Llewellyn offered fresh approaches to the study of law and society. Although these writings might not seem innovative today, because they have become widely applied in the contemporary world, they remain a testament to his. The ideas he advanced many decades ago have now become commonplace among contemporary jurisprudence scholars as well as social scientists studying law and legal issues.Legal realism, the ground of Llewellyn's theory, attempts to contextualize the practice of law. Its proponents argue that a host of extra-legal factors--social, cultural, historical, and psychological, to name a few--are at least as important in determining legal outcomes as are the rules and principles by which the legal system operates. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., book, The Common Law, is regarded as the founder of legal realism. Holmes stated that in order to truly understand the workings of law, one must go beyond technical (or logical) elements entailing rules and procedures. The life of the law is not only that which is embodied in statutes and court decisions guided by procedural law. Law is just as much about experience: about flesh-and-blood human beings doings things together and making decisions.Llewellyn's version of legal realism was heavily influenced by Pound and Holmes. The distinction between ""law in books"" and ""law in action"" is an acknowledgement of the gap that exists between law as embodied in criminal, civil, and administrative code books, and law. A fully formed legal realism insists on studying the behavior of legal practitioners, including their practices, habits, and techniques of action as well as decision-making about others. This classic studyis a foremosthistorical work on legal theory, and is essential for understanding the roots of this influential perspective.