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Reflections On The Nature Of Legal Scholarship In The Post-Realist Era, Marin Roger Scordato
Reflections On The Nature Of Legal Scholarship In The Post-Realist Era, Marin Roger Scordato
Scholarly Articles
This article presents a tightly organized and closely reasoned analysis of legal scholarship in the current post-realist era. Secure and well-defined within the formalist legal world of the nineteenth century, the practice of legal scholarship has been profoundly affected by the realist revolution of the early twentieth century and the instrumentalist view of law that now prevails in the twenty-first century. In response, legal scholars have been forced to dramatically alter the focus, the materials and the basic methods of their study. The practice of legal scholarship is currently occupied in a prolonged struggle to adapt to these changes and …
Post-Realist Blues: Formalism, Instrumentalism, And The Hybrid Nature Of Common Law Jurisprudence, Marin Roger Scordato
Post-Realist Blues: Formalism, Instrumentalism, And The Hybrid Nature Of Common Law Jurisprudence, Marin Roger Scordato
Scholarly Articles
At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was widely believed that appellate courts determined the outcome of disputed issues of law predominately by the application of pre-existing precedent and time honored legal maxims. The primary work of the common law courts was thought to be this distinctive identification, maintenance, inductive development and case specific deductive application of the body of precedent in its jurisdiction, sometimes known as formalism.
Starting with the influence of the legal realists in the 1920s, a profound shift took place in the dominant conception of the nature of common law jurisprudence. Here, at the beginning …