In the myriad choices of interpretation judges face when confronted with rules and cases, legal realists are concerned with how these doctrinal materials carry over into judicial outcomes. What can explain past judicial behavior and predict its future course? How can law constrain judgments made by unelected judges? How can the distinction between law and politics be maintained despite the collapse of law's autonomy in its positivist rendition? In Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory, Hanoch Dagan provides an innovative and useful interpretation of legal realism. He revives the legal realists' rich account of law as a growing institution accommodating three sets of constitutive tensions-power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress-and demonstrates how the major claims attributed to legal realism fit into this conception of law. Dagan seeks to rein in realist descendants who have become fixated on one aspect of the big picture, and to dispel the misconceptions that those gone astray represent the tradition accurately or that realism is now merely a historical signpost. He draws upon the realist texts of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, and others to explain how legal realism offers important and unique jurisprudential insights that are not just a part of legal history, but are also relevant and useful for a contemporary understanding of legal theory. Building on this realist conception of law and enriching its texture, Dagan addresses more particular jurisprudential questions. He shows that the realist achievement in capturing law's irreducible complexity is crucial to the reinvigoration of legal theory as a distinct scholarly subject matter, and is also inspiring for a host of other, more specific theoretical topics, such as the rule of law, the autonomy and taxonomy of private law, the relationships between rights and remedies, and the pluralism and perfectionism that typify private law.

This book demonstrates how legal realism offers important and unique jurisprudential insights that are not just a part of legal history, but are also relevant and useful for a contemporary understanding of legal theory.

Some of the most exciting and innovative legal scholarship has been driven by historical curiosity. Legal history today comes in a fascinating array of shapes and sizes, from microhistory to global intellectual history. Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation. Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal history and other disciplinary perspectives including economic, philosophical, comparative, literary, and rhetorical analysis of law. Part II considers various approaches to legal history, including legal history as doctrinal, intellectual, or social history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, cultures, and space. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbooks focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts.

"This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects-property, contracts, and torts-as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law's various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law-including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological- yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law."--

This insightful Research Handbook provides a definitive overview of the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement, reaching beyond historical and national boundaries to form new conversations. Drawing on deep roots within the law-and-society tradition, it demonstrates the powerful virtues of new legal realist research and its attention to the challenges of translation between social science and law. It explores an impressive range of contemporary issues including immigration, policing, globalization, legal education, and access to justice, concluding with and examination of how different social science disciplines intersect with NLR.

This volume offers a critical analysis and illustration of the challenges and promises of ’stateless’ law thought, pedagogy and approaches to governance - that is, understanding and conceptualizing law in a post-national condition. From common, civil and international law perspectives, the collection focuses on the definition and role of law as an academic discipline, and hybridity in the practice and production of law. With contributions by a diverse and international group of scholars, the collection includes fourteen chapters written in English and three in French. Confronting the ’transnational challenge’ posed to the traditional theoretical and institutional structures that underlie the teaching and study of law in the university, the seventeen authors of Stateless Law: Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline bring new insight to the ongoing and crucial conversation about the future shape of legal scholarship, education and practice that is emblematic of the early twenty-first century. This collection is essential reading for academics, institutions and others involved in determining the future roles, responsibilities and education of jurists, as well as for academics interested in Law, Sociology, Political Science and Education.

The book offers contributions to a philosophical and realistic approach to the place of adjudication in contemporary constitutional democracies. Bringing together scholars from different legal and philosophical backgrounds, the book purports to cast light on the role(s) of judges and the function of judicial interpretation inside of constitutional states, from the standpoint of legal realism as a revisited and sophisticated jurisprudential outlook. In so doing, the book also copes with a few major jurisprudential issues, like, e.g., determining the ideas that make up the core of legal realism, exploring the relation between legal realism and legal positivism, identifying the boundaries of judicial interpretation as they appear from a realist standpoint, as well as considering some skeptical outlooks on the very claims of contemporary legal realism.

This edited volume explores ideas of legal realism which emerge through the works of Russian legal philosophers. Apart from the well-known American and Scandinavian versions of legal realism, there also exists a Russian one: readers will discover fresh perspectives and that the collection of early twentieth century ideas on law discussed in Russia can be understood as a unified school of legal thought – as Russian legal realism. These chapters by renowned European and Eastern European legal philosophers add to ongoing discussions about the nature of law, especially in the context of developments around our scientific knowledge about the mind and behaviour. Analyses of legal phenomena carried out by legal realists in Russia offer novel arguments in favour of embracing psychological and sociological perspectives on the law. The book includes analysis of the St. Petersburg school of legal philosophy and Leon Petrażycki’s psychological theory of law. This original and multifaceted research on Russian realists is of considerable value to an international audience. Researchers and postgraduate students of law, legal theory and legal ethics will find the book particularly appealing, but it will also interest those investigating the philosophy or sociology of law, or legal history.

This book brings together a wide range of contributors from across the common law world to identify and debate the principal moral and systemic challenges facing private law in the remaining part of the twenty-first century. The various contributions identify serious problems relating to complexity and overload, threats to research and education, the law's unintelligibility, the unsatisfactory nature of the law reform process and a general lack of public engagement. They consider the respective future roles of statutes, codes, and judge-made law (in the form of both common law and equitable rules). They consider how best to organise the private law system internally, and how to co-ordinate it externally with other public and economic systems (human rights, regulation, insurance markets and social security frameworks). They address the challenges for private law presented by new forms of technology, and by modern demands for the protection of new and intangible forms of moral interest, such as interests in privacy, 'vindication' and 'personal choice'. They also engage with the critical contemporary debates about access to, and the privatisation of, civil justice. The work is designed as a source of inspiration and reference for private lawyers, as well as legislators, policy-makers and students.