Foundations of American Legal Realism

Abstract

If we were to study the history of western thought since 1850, perhaps the most important writers of the past century in terms of their impact on modern American jurisprudence would be Marx, Darwin, Comte, Freud, James and Dewey. Economic determinism, evolution and historicism, positivism, pragmatism and instrumentalism, and psychoanalysis have all had an influential part in shaping the main currents of the modern legal mind.

...The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I use the phrase “the law” in the sense of sequences of external facts and their concrete legal consequences through the concrete operation of governmental machinery.

Joseph W. Bingham

...Law defines a relation not always between fixed points, but often, indeed oftenest, between points of varying position. The acts and situations to be regulated have a motion of their own. There is change whether we will it or not.

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo