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Legal Realism
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law. It is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world. Legal realists believe that legal science should only investigate law with the value-free methods of natural sciences, rather than through philosophical inquiries into the nature and meaning of the law that are separate and distinct from the law as it is actually practiced. Indeed, legal realism asserts that the law cannot be separated from its application, nor can it be understood outside of its application. As such, legal realism emphasizes law as it actually exists, rather than the law as it ought to be. Locating the meaning of law in areas like legal opinions issued by judges and their deference or dismissal of past precedent and the doctrine of '' stare decisis'', it stresses the importance of understanding the factors involved in judicial decision ma ...
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Naturalism (philosophy)
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only Physical law, natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe. According to philosopher Steven Lockwood, naturalism can be separated into an ontological sense and a methodological sense. "Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. On an ontological level, philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argues that nature is best accounted for by reference to Matter, material principles. These principles include mass, energy, and other Physical property, physical and Chemical property, chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, Deity, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no "Teleology, purpose" in nature. This stronger formulation of naturalism is commonly referred to as ''metaphysical naturalism''. On the other hand, the more ...
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Underhill Moore
William Underhill Moore (1879–1949) was an American legal scholar and Sterling Professor of Law at the Yale Law School (1929–49), having previously taught at Columbia. His principal teaching fields were commercial bank credit and business organizations, Moore was considered one of the intellectual leaders of the Legal Realism movement at Yale and an early user of social scientific methods in legal research. In 1929 he was co-author with Theodore S. Hope Jr. of "An Institutional Approach to the Law of Commercial Banking," as published in the Yale Law Journal, 1929, an explanation and predicting of banking law decisions that "did not appear to derive from existing legal rules by determining the extent to which the facts of the case deviated from normal banking practice." Moore believed that judicial decisions often reflected norms of commercial behavior rather than judicial precedent, and he therefore sought to establish a body of factual empirical data as the basis of legal stud ...
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Prediction Theory Of Law
The prediction theory of law was a key component of the Oliver Wendell Holmes's jurisprudential philosophy. At its most basic, the theory is an attempted refutation of most previous definitions of the law. Holmes believed that the law should be defined as a prediction, most specifically, a prediction of how the courts behave. His rationale was based on an argument regarding the opinion of a "bad man." Bad men, Holmes argued in his speech "The Path of the Law", care little for ethics or lofty conceptions of natural law; instead they care simply about staying out of jail and avoiding the payment of damages. In Holmes's mind, therefore, it was most useful to define "the law" as a prediction of what will bring punishment or other consequences from a court. The theory played a key role in influencing American legal realism. H. L. A. Hart criticized the theories in his ''The Concept of Law'' (1961). He argued that (1) they were blind to the internal point of view towards law, the se ...
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John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politici ...
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Benjamin Cardozo
Benjamin ( he, ''Bīnyāmīn''; "Son of (the) right") blue letter bible: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3225/kjv/wlc/0-1/ H3225 - yāmîn - Strong's Hebrew Lexicon (kjv) was the last of the two sons of Jacob and Rachel (Jacob's thirteenth child and twelfth and youngest son) in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition. He was also the progenitor of the Israelite Tribe of Benjamin. Unlike Rachel's first son, Joseph, Benjamin was born in Canaan according to biblical narrative. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, Benjamin's name appears as "Binyamēm" (Samaritan Hebrew: , "son of days"). In the Quran, Benjamin is referred to as a righteous young child, who remained with Jacob when the older brothers plotted against Joseph. Later rabbinic traditions name him as one of four ancient Israelites who died without sin, the other three being Chileab, Jesse and Amram. Name The name is first mentioned in letters from King Sîn-kāšid of Uruk (1801–1771 BC), who called himself “King ...
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John Chipman Gray
John Chipman Gray (July 14, 1839February 25, 1915) was an American scholar of property law and professor at Harvard Law School. He also founded the law firm Ropes & Gray, with law partner John Codman Ropes. He was half-brother to U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Horace Gray, and a grandson of merchant and politician William Gray. Early life Gray was born in Brighton, Massachusetts to Horace and Sarah Russell (Gardner) Gray, and graduated from Boston Latin School. From there, he went on to Harvard University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1859, and Harvard Law School, where he earned his law degree in 1861. Gray's politics, prior to the Civil War tended toward the Whig Party. However, he transited into the Know-Nothing Party when the Whigs collapsed. Although he became a Republican, he opined, while serving as a judge advocate, that President Abraham Lincoln did not possess the constitutional authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. However, when t ...
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Roscoe Pound
Nathan Roscoe Pound (October 27, 1870 – June 30, 1964) was an American legal scholar and educator. He served as Dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law from 1903 to 1911 and Dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936. He was a member of Northwestern University, the University of Chicago Law School and the faculty at UCLA School of Law in the school's early years, from 1949 to 1952. ''The Journal of Legal Studies'' has identified Pound as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century. Early life and education Pound was born in Lincoln, Nebraska to Stephen Bosworth Pound and Laura Pound. His sister was the noted linguist and folklorist, Louise Pound. Pound studied botany at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he became a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. He received his bachelor's degree in 1888 and his master's degree in 1889. In 1889 he began the study of law; he spent one year at Harvard but never received a law degree. Following his year at Ha ...
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932.Holmes was Acting Chief Justice of the United States in February 1930. He is one of the most widely cited U.S. Supreme Court justices and most influential American common law judges in history, noted for his long service, pithy opinions—particularly those on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy—and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures. Holmes retired from the court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice on the Supreme Court.John Paul Stevens was only 8 months younger when he retired on April 12, 2010. He previously served as a Brevet Colonel in the American Civil War, in which he was wounded three times, as an associate justice and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and as Weld Professor of Law at his alm ...
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Legal Positivism
Legal positivism (as understood in the Anglosphere) is a school of thought of analytical jurisprudence developed largely by legal philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism provided the theoretical basis for such developments to occur. The most prominent legal positivist writer in English has been H. L. A. Hart, who, in 1958, found common usages of "positivism" as applied to law to include the contentions that: * laws are commands of human beings; * there is not any necessary relation between law and morality, that is, between law as it is and as it ought to be; * analysis (or study of the meaning) of legal concepts is worthwhile and is to be distinguished from history or sociology of law, as well as from criticism or appraisal of law, for example with regard to its moral value or to its social aims or functions; * a legal system is a closed, logical system in which ...
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Natural Law
Natural law ( la, ius naturale, ''lex naturalis'') is a system of law based on a close observation of human nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of positive law (the express enacted laws of a state or society). According to natural law theory (called jusnaturalism), all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason." Natural law theory can also refer to "theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality." In the Western tradition, it was anticipated by the pre-Socratics, for example in their search for principles that governed the cosmos and human beings. The concept of natural law was documented in ancient Greek philosophy, including Aristotle, and was referred to in ancient Roman philosophy by Cicero. References to it are also to be found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and were later expou ...
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Legal Formalism
Legal formalism is both a descriptive theory and a normative theory of how judges should decide cases. In its descriptive sense, formalists maintain that judges reach their decisions by applying uncontroversial principles to the facts; formalists believe that there is an underlying logic to the many legal principles that may underlie different cases. These principles, they claim, are straightforward and can be readily discovered by anyone with some legal expertise. The ultimate goal of that kind of formalism would be to describe the underlying principles in a single and determinate system that could be applied mechanically—from which the term "mechanical jurisprudence" comes. The antithesis of formalism is legal realism, which has been said to be " rhaps the most pervasive and accepted theory of how judges arrive at legal decisions." This descriptive conception of "legal formalism" can be extended to a normative theory, which holds that judges should decide cases by the appli ...
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New Legal Realism
New legal realism (NLR) is an emerging school of thought in American legal philosophy. Although it draws on the older legal realism from the first half of the twentieth century, new legal realism differs in important ways. Notably, it moves beyond the older field's emphasis on judges, courts, and formal legal systems. New legal realism examines law in people's everyday lives, using an interdisciplinary combination of current social science methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and experimental approaches. It is characterized by a “ground-level up” perspective, which focuses on laypeople's experiences with law as well as studying legal professionals and formal institutions. Research methods are chosen according to evolving research questions, responding to changing understandings as knowledge accumulates. This and other features of NLR fit well with the American pragmatist philosophical tradition. Some NLR scholarsNourse, Victoria, and Gregory Shaffer. ''Varieties of ...
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