Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T23:16:34.514Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Biographing Realist Jurisprudence

Review products

DaliaTsuk Mitchell. 2007. Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pp. xi + 368. $62.95 cloth.
Spencer WeberWaller. 2005. Thurman Arnold: A Biography. New York: New York University Press. Pp. xi + 273. $45.00 cloth.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Roy Kreitner
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay reexamines realist jurisprudence through a review of two biographies of leading realists: Dalia Tsuk Mitchell'sArchitect of Justice: Felix Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (2007), and Spencer Waller'sThurman Arnold: A Biography (2005). The essay argues that when biographies of legal realists are considered alongside their academic writing, a more robust jurisprudence emerges. Realist lives crystallize the intuition that the major innovation of legal realism was not, as generally assumed, its attitude toward judges and adjudication. Instead, realist jurisprudence is an institutionalist view of law with a focus on groups rather than individuals. Realist jurisprudence understands courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and nongovernmental groups as important loci of law, lawmaking, and legal reasoning.

Information

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , Summer 2010, pp. 765 - 791
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ayer, Douglas. 1971. In Quest of Efficiency: The Ideological Journey of Thurman Arnold in the Interwar Period. Stanford Law Review 23:1049–86.Google Scholar
Breen, John M. 2000. Statutory Interpretation and the Lessons of Llewellyn. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 33:263–448.Google Scholar
Brinkley, Alan. 1993. The Antimonopoly Ideal and the Liberal State: The Case of Thurman Arnold. Journal of American History 80 (2): 557–79.Google Scholar
Brinkley, Alan. 1996. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Cohen, Felix S. 1933. Ethical Systems and Legal Ideals: An Essay on the Foundations of Legal Criticism. New York: Falcon Press.Google Scholar
Dagan, Hanoch. 2007. The Realist Conception of Law. University of Toronto Law Journal 57:607–60.Google Scholar
De Been, Wouter. 2008. Legal Realism Regained: Saving Realism from Critical Acclaim. Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books.Google Scholar
Duxbury, Neil. 1990. Some Radicalism about Realism? Thurman Arnold and the Politics of Modern Jurisprudence. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10 (1): 11–41.Google Scholar
Duxbury, Neil. 1991. Jerome Frank and the Legacy of Legal Realism. Journal of Law and Society 18 (2): 175–205.Google Scholar
Duxbury, Neil. 1995. Patterns of American Jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Duxbury, Neil. 2004. Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition, Oxford Studies in Modern Legal History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Law's Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ernst, Daniel R. 2009. Lawyers, Bureaucratic Autonomy, and Securities Regulation During the New Deal. Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 1470934. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1470934 (accessed January 1, 2010).Google Scholar
Fenster, Mark. 2003. The Symbols of Governance: Thurman Arnold and Post‐Realist Legal Theory. Buffalo Law Review 51:1053–1118.Google Scholar
Fenster, Mark. 2007. The Folklore of Legal Biography. Review of Thurman Arnold: A Biography by Spencer Weber Waller. Michigan Law Review 105:1265–82.Google Scholar
Fisher, William W., Horwitz, Morton J., and Reed, Thomas, eds. 1993. American Legal Realism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Frankfurter, Felix. 1916. Hours of Labor and Realism in Constitutional Law. Harvard Law Review 29:353–73.Google Scholar
Fuller, Lon L. 1978. The Forms and Limits of Adjudication. Harvard Law Review 92:353–409.Google Scholar
Glennon, Robert Jerome. 1985. The Iconoclast as Reformer: Jerome Frank's Impact on American Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert W. 2004. Professors and Policymakers: Yale Law School Faculty in the New Deal and After. In History of the Yale Law School, ed. Kronman, Anthony T., 75–137. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert W. 2008. The American Legal Profession, 1870–2000. In The Cambridge History of Law in America, ed. Grossberg, Michael and Tomlins, Christopher, 73–126. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grey, Thomas C. 1996. Modern American Legal Thought. Yale Law Journal 106:493–517.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Walton H. 1919. The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory. American Economic Review 9 (Suppl.):309–18.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Walton H. 2005 1932. Institution. Journal of Institutional Economics 1 (2): 233–44. Repr. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds. 1932. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 8, 84–89. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Walton H., Adams, Mark, Abrahamson, Albert, Till, Irene, and Marshall, George, eds. 1938. Price and Price Policies. New York: McGraw‐Hill.Google Scholar
Hart, H. L. A. 1994. The Concept of Law, 2nd. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hart, Henry M., and Sacks, Albert M. 1994. The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and Application of Law, ed. Eskridge, William N. and Frickey, Philip P. Westbury, NY: Foundation Press.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. 2001. How Economics Forgot History. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J. 1992. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hull, N. E. H. 1997. Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn: Searching for an American Jurisprudence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Irons, Peter H. 1982. The New Deal Lawyers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. 1986. Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. 1990. Abe Fortas: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kalman, Laura. 1998. The Power of Biography. Review of Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century by Pnina Lahav. Law & Social Inquiry 23 (2): 479–530.Google Scholar
Kamp, Allen R. 1995. Between‐the‐Wars Social Thought: Karl Llewellyn, Legal Realism, and the Uniform Commercial Code in Context. Albany Law Review 59:325–97.Google Scholar
Kamp, Allen R. 1998. Uptown Act: A History of the Uniform Commercial Code: 1940–1949. Southern Methodist University Law Review 51:275–348.Google Scholar
Kamp, Allen R. 2001. Downtown Code: A History of the Uniform Commercial Code 1949–1954. Buffalo Law Review 49:359–476.Google Scholar
Kelsen, Hans. 1967. Pure Theory of Law, trans. Max Knight. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. 2000. From the Will Theory to the Principle of Private Autonomy: Lon Fuller's “Consideration and Form. Columbia Law Review 100:94–175.Google Scholar
Komesar, Neil K. 1994. Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kronman, Anthony. 1988. Jurisprudential Responses to Legal Realism. Cornell Law Review 73:335–40.Google Scholar
Lacey, Nicola. 2004. A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Leiter, Brian. 1997. Rethinking Legal Realism: Toward a Naturalized Jurisprudence. Texas Law Review 76:266–315.Google Scholar
Leiter, Brian. 2007. Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, Karl N. 1925. The Effect of Legal Institutions Upon Economics. American Economic Review 15 (4): 665–83.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, Karl N. 1931. Some Realism About Realism—Responding to Dean Pound. Harvard Law Review 44:1222–64.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, Karl N. 1934. The Constitution as an Institution. Oregon Law Review 14:108–30.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, Karl N. 1962. Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
MacCormick, Neil. 2007. Institutions of Law: An Essay in Legal Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Murphy, Bruce Allen. 2003. Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Nourse, Victoria F., and Shaffer, Gregory C. 2009. Varieties of New Legal Realism: Can a New World Order Prompt a New Legal Theory? Cornell Law Review 95:61–137.Google Scholar
Peller, Gary. 1988. Neutral Principles in the 1950's. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 21:561–622.Google Scholar
Raz, Joseph. 1979. The Authority of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1998. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rutherford, Malcolm. 2003. On the Economic Frontier: Walton Hamilton, Institutional Economics, and Education. History of Political Economy 35 (4): 611–53.Google Scholar
Schlegel, John Henry. 1995. American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Shamir, Ronen. 1995. Managing Legal Uncertainty: Elite Lawyers in the New Deal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Singer, Joseph William. 1988. Legal Realism Now. Review of Legal Realism at Yale: 1927–1960 by Laura Kalman. California Law Review 76:465–544.Google Scholar
Stone, Katherine V. W. 2010. John R. Commons and the Origins of Legal Realism, or, the Other Tragedy of the Commons. In Transformations in American Legal History II: Law, Ideology, and Methods—Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz, vol. 2, ed. Hamilton, Daniel W. and Brophy, Alfred L., 326–43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Summers, Robert S. 1982. Instrumentalism and American Legal Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Tamanaha, Brian Z. 2009. Beyond the Formalist‐Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tsuk Mitchell, Dalia. 2007. Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Tsuk Mitchell, Dalia. 2009. Transformations: Pluralism, Individualism, and Democracy. In Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz, ed. Hamilton, Daniel W. and Brophy, Alfred L., 185–210. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Twining, William. 1985a. Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Original edition, 1973.Google Scholar
Twining, William. 1985b. Talk about Realism. New York University Law Review 60 (3):329–84.Google Scholar
Ulmer, S. Sidney. 1960. Review: The Legal Realism of Jerome Frank, by Julius Paul. The Western Political Quarterly 13 (1): 237–38.Google Scholar
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. 1996. What Should Legal Analysis Become? New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. Law and Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Waller, Spencer Weber. 2005. Thurman Arnold: A Biography. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Wechsler, Herbert. 1959. Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law. Harvard Law Review 73:1–35.Google Scholar
White, G. Edward. 1973. The Evolution of Reasoned Elaboration: Jurisprudential Criticism and Social Change. Virginia Law Review 59:279–302.Google Scholar
Wiseman, Zipporah Batshaw. 1987. The Limits of Vision: Karl Llewellyn and the Merchant Rules. Harvard Law Review 100:465–545.Google Scholar