15 - The Significance of Realism

Summary

The indeterminacy of ‘realism’ and the dangers of generalizing about ‘the realists’ have been a recurrent theme of this book. Yet the label has stuck and the modern reader, confronted with an apparent morass of literature by ‘realists’ or about ‘realism’, may quite reasonably ask for some general guidance. How much of this literature deserves to survive? What is a good way to approach it if one is to avoid both unwarranted generalization and barren controversy? In particular, what should law students in North America, the British Isles or elsewhere be encouraged to learn from the study of American legal realism? A partial answer to these questions is implicit in what has been said earlier. The purpose of the present chapter is to deal with them in a more direct fashion.

Some of the more obvious pitfalls of interpretation are quite easily avoided if the realist movement is approached on three different levels, which may be roughly characterized as the historical, the analytical and the applied. The realist movement should be viewed, in first instance, not as a school of jurisprudence but as an historical phenomenon. The starting point should be to identify the concerns of particular individuals at particular moments in time. In Part One some of the concerns of some key figures were sketched. From this preliminary account, which should not be treated as a substitute for a detailed history, it is apparent that the intellectual roots of the realist movement were rather complex.