American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science

American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science
Author: John Henry Schlegel
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807864366

John Henry Schlegel recovers a largely ignored aspect of American Legal Realism, a movement in legal thought in the 1920s and 1930s that sought to bring the modern notion of empirical science into the study and teaching of law. In this book, he explores individual Realist scholars' efforts to challenge the received notion that the study of law was primarily a matter of learning rules and how to manipulate them. He argues that empirical research was integral to Legal Realism, and he explores why this kind of research did not, finally, become a part of American law school curricula. Schlegel reviews the work of several prominent Realists but concentrates on the writings of Walter Wheeler Cook, Underhill Moore, and Charles E. Clark. He reveals how their interest in empirical research was a product of their personal and professional circumstances and demonstrates the influence of John Dewey's ideas on the expression of that interest. According to Schlegel, competing understandings of the role of empirical inquiry contributed to the slow decline of this kind of research by professors of law. Originally published in 1995. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science

American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science
Author: John Henry Schlegel
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1995
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807821794

John Henry Schlegel recovers a largely ignored aspect of American Legal Realism, a movement in legal thought in the 1920's and 1930's that sought to bring the modern notion of empirical science into the study and teaching of law. In this book, he explores individual Realist scholars' efforts to challenge the received notion that the study of law was primarily a matter of learning rules and how to manipulate them. He argues that empirical research was integral to Legal Realism, and he explores why this kind of research did not, finally, become a part of American law school curricula.

Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism

Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism
Author: Shauhin Talesh
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2021-03-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1788117778

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.

The New Legal Realism: Volume 1

The New Legal Realism: Volume 1
Author: Elizabeth Mertz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781107071131

This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory. Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work covers such wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis, intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society.

The Behavior of Federal Judges

The Behavior of Federal Judges
Author: Lee Epstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2013-01-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674070682

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made. The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors' view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making. Federal judges are not just robots or politicians in robes.

Legal Realism to Law in Action

Legal Realism to Law in Action
Author: William Clune
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1610274393

This is a book of papers and interviews about innovative law school courses developed by faculty of the Wisconsin Law School from 1950 to 1970 that forged a path from legal realism to law and social science. These courses took a “law in action” approach to the study of law which became a signature feature of the school’s tradition from that time to the present day. “The Legal Realists of the 1920s and 30s taught that the law that mattered was the law in action, as applied by ordinary officials and experienced by ordinary people. But they mostly failed to get their program adopted as part of professional education alongside the study of appellate cases. Only at Wisconsin—thanks to a cluster of great scholar-teachers in Willard Hurst, Frank Remington, Herman Goldstein, Stewart Macaulay, Bill Whitford, and their collaborators—has the Realist vision been fully and splendidly realized in law teaching. This is the story of that thrilling experiment.” — Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law Emeritus, Stanford University; Chancellor Kent Professor Emeritus of Law and Legal History, Yale Law School “This book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the law and society movement and the unique role that the University of Wisconsin Law School has played in that tradition. In a series of essays by and interviews of current and former Wisconsin law teachers, the creativity of Wisconsin’s challenge to the traditional legal academy comes alive.” — Lauren Edelman, Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley "In a time when an increasing number of law schools characterize themselves as bastions of 'law in action,' this volume provides a bracing reminder of a more precise vision. That vision was rooted in the legal realist tradition during an earlier 'golden age' of sociolegal thought at the University of Wisconsin Law School. In this important book, we hear vivid accounts of the innovative law teaching during that time, which took realist discoveries seriously—in Contracts, Legal Process, Legal History, and Criminal Law.” — Elizabeth Mertz, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation; John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emerita, UW-Madison Law School

Along Freedom Road

Along Freedom Road
Author: David S. Cecelski
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807860735

David Cecelski chronicles one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement--the 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County, North Carolina. For an entire year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. Parents and students held nonviolent protests daily for five months, marched twice on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a massive gunfight. The threatened closing of Hyde County's black schools collided with a rich and vibrant educational heritage that had helped to sustain the black community since Reconstruction. As other southern school boards routinely closed black schools and displaced their educational leaders, Hyde County blacks began to fear that school desegregation was undermining--rather than enhancing--this legacy. This book, then, is the story of one county's extraordinary struggle for civil rights, but at the same time it explores the fight for civil rights in all of eastern North Carolina and the dismantling of black education throughout the South.

Legal Realism and American Law

Legal Realism and American Law
Author: Justin Zaremby
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2013-12-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1441135723

In the first part of the 20th century, a group of law scholars offered engaging, and occasionally disconcerting, views on the role of judges and the relationship between law and politics in the United States. These legal realists borrowed methods from the social sciences to carefully study the law as experienced by lawyers, judges, and average citizens and promoted a progressive vision for American law and society. Legal realism investigated the nature of legal reasoning, the purpose of law, and the role of judges. The movement asked questions which reshaped the study of jurisprudence and continue to drive lively debates about the law and politics in classrooms, courtrooms, and even the halls of Congress. This thorough analysis provides an introduction to the ideas, context, and leading personalities of legal realism. It helps situate an important movement in legal theory in the context of American politics and political thought and will be of great interest to students of judicial politics, American constitutional development, and political theory.