2.5 Realist School of Law

Core claim: law is what officials actually do about disputes — not what books say; the study of law must be the study of courts, judges and facts, empirically and skeptically. Two wings: American realism: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — "the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience"; law is "the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact"; Karl Llewellyn — law = the behaviour of law-officials about disputes; "the rules are important chiefly as tools" (grand style vs formal style); Jerome Frank — Law and the Modern Mind: trial- court facts are themselves manufactured (witnesses, lawyers, juries) — fact-skepticism (the trial judge's breakfast as jurisprudence); Cardozo — The Judicial Process: the honest anatomy of how judges actually decide (forces: logic, history, custom, justice, sociology). Scandinavian realism: philosophical rather than behavioural — Axel Hägerström denied legal concepts' metaphysical reality (rights and duties as "magic words" — conceptual skepticism); Alf Ross (On Law and Justice): law as the ideology of officials, valid when it predictively guides their actions (his famous tû-tû essay demystifying legal concepts); Karl Olivecrona, the same cleansing applied to will and force. Contribution: the empirical study of adjudication; debunked mechanical jurisprudence (the myth that judges merely apply); training for advocacy (persuade the judge, not the textbook); the intellectual seed of law-and-society…