Judges Commons^™

Judging The Judges: A Case Study In Judicial Responsibility, Maximilian J.B. Welker, Jr.

Seattle University Law Review

Scholarly and professional perceptions of the role of the judiciary, and hence of the responsibility of judges, have undergone radical change since the early 1900's, and judicial opinions have both reflected and been influenced by those perceptions. At the turn of the century, conceptual abstraction and logical consistency held sway. Formalism, however, gave way to Legal Realism in the 1920's and 30's. Of the many important contributions that Realism made to the way we think about law, the most fundamental was its recognition that formal rules do not mechanically govern the resolution of legal disputes. Under this conception, the dominant …