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.

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.

Llewellyn, Karl N. Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice. [Chicago]: The University of Chicago Press, 1962. viii, 531 pp. Reprinted 2000 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-056923. ISBN 1-58477-067-8. Cloth. $95. * Considered to be one of the great American legal philosophers of the twentieth century, Llewellyn [1893-1962], was a distinguished professor of law at the University of Chicago, visiting professor at Leipzig and Harvard Universities, and also taught at Yale and Columbia. He wrote extensively and was the chief draftsman of the Uniform Commercial Code. In this collection of essays Llewellyn presents his unique theory of Realism as applied to jurisprudence in theory; and social institutions, including the bar, in practice.

American legal history is traditionally viewed as a succession of discrete schools of thought or landmark court decisions, not as the work of individuals. Such an approach, however, hardly does justice to the lives of two of the foremost teachers and theorists of American jurisprudence. In Roscoe Pound and Karl Llwellyn: Searcbing for an American Jurisprudence, N. E. H. Hull reconstructs the historical, cultural, and intellectual context of the work of Pound and Llewellyn, bringing to light their private and public relationship as well as the diverse sources - from psychology to plant ecology to Icelandic sagas - they separately drew upon in making their contributions to the American legal tradition.

Karl N. Llewellyn was one of the founders and major figures of legal realism, and his many keen insights have a central place in American law and legal understanding. Key to Llewellyn’s thinking was his conception of rules, put forward in his numerous writings and most famously in his often mischaracterized declaration that they are “pretty playthings.” Previously unpublished, The Theory of Rules is the most cogent presentation of his profound and insightful thinking about the life of rules. This book frames the development of Llewellyn’s thinking and describes the difference between what rules literally prescribe and what is actually done, with the gap explained by a complex array of practices, conventions, professional skills, and idiosyncrasies, most of which are devoted to achieving a law’s larger purpose rather than merely following the letter of a particular rule. Edited, annotated, and with an extensive analytic introduction by leading contemporary legal scholar Frederick Schauer, this rediscovered work contains material not found elsewhere in Llewellyn’s writings and will prove a valuable contribution to the existing literature on legal realism.