Legal realism

‘Legal realism’ is the term commonly used to characterize various currents of twentieth-century legal thought which stand opposed to idealism. (Hence, ‘realism’ in this context ought to be understood not as a body of thought which opposes nominalism, but as an instance of nominalism.) In the Scandinavian countries, legal realism was modelled on Axel Hägerström’s critique of idealist metaphysics, and sought ways to account for legal rights and duties without presupposing or postulating the existence of ideal objects or entities. In the USA, legal realism evolved as a critique of the idealism implicit in the vision of the common law which was promoted by C.C. Langdell, first Dean of the Harvard Law School, and in the laissez-faire ideology of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Supreme Court. Realist jurisprudential sentiments – primarily as articulated in terms of the so-called indeterminacy critique – continue to bear an influence on late twentieth-century critical legal thought.