From Law and Society to New Legal Realism: Legal realist (dis)continuities in U.S. socio-legal thought
Panagiotis Develekos, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
In my talk I will present my doctoral project, focusing on questions of overall structure, and on its relevance for the current academic debate. The original inspiration of my work lies on the recent rejuvenation of the legacy of American Legal Realism (LR – or realist legacy) within U.S. legal academia, primarily by the movements of New Legal Realism (NLR) and Law and Political Economy (LPE). The research question that I am posing is how it is possible that two epistemologically and thematically divergent movements can claim the same legacy, and what makes LR retain its intellectual weight within U.S. (socio)legal thought for over a century.
My answer to this question unfolds in three steps. The first step is to argue, in accordance with long established literature (Duxbury 1992. Twining 2002), that legal realism has been a multidimensional tradition-movement from the outset and thus should not be defined based on one theme. Accordingly, my second step is to define the LR tradition, by distinguishing analytically between three legacies: rule-skepticism, legal empiricism, and law and economics. This move allows me to proceed to the final step which is to examine how these three realist legacies were “picked up” and carried forward by their respective intellectual descendants, with NLR and LPE being the most recent example.
The realist legacy would not, however, retain its intellectual weight for such long time if there were not any unifying elements to this multidimensional body of scholarship. The two factors I identify as playing this role pertain to both the intellectual meaning and the symbolic function of the realist banner: the shared dissatisfaction with law’s capacity to address changing societal needs, and, within U.S. legal academia, the existence of a powerful imaginary — that of a successful “revolt against formalism.” (White 1947).