The New Legal Realism and The Realist View of Law

Abstract

New legal realism (NLR) furthers the legal realist legacy by focusing attention on both the pertinent social science and the craft that typifies legal discourse and legal institutions. NLR's globalized ambitions also highlight the potential of a nonstatist view of law. The realist view of law raises three challenges facing NLR: identifying the “lingua franca” of law as an academic discipline within which NLR insights on translation and synthesis should be situated; conceptualizing NLR's focus on bottom-up investigation, so that it does not defy the rule of law; and recognizing the normative underpinning for NLR's reformist impulse.