Michael S. Green (William & Mary Law School) has posted American Legal Realism (Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy, John Linarelli ed., Edward Elgar, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
American legal realism was a jurisprudential movement that flourished in the 1920s and ’30s in the United States. This entry describes several central themes in the realists’ writings. One is an emphasis on judicial discretion, which was in turn supported by several (sometimes incompatible) positions, including an expansive view of legal indeterminacy, a decision theory of law based in judicial supremacy, a prediction theory of law based in legal positivism and philosophical anarchism, and legal particularism. Other central themes in the realists’ writings were the advocacy of the empirical study of legal practice and the reform of legal rules and of the concept of law to better mirror the causal determinants of judicial decisions.
Recommended! This piece will be especially useful for readers who want a concise overview of the realist movement of the 1920s and 30s.
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