Legal realism
The term legal realism denotes a direction of legal philosophy or legal theory .
Legal realism - like legal positivism - is anti-metaphysical , as Axel Hägerström put it: Instead of being based on moral values, it restricts itself to the description of concrete experiences. Legal realism places particular value on the consideration of factors influencing the law from outside, in particular social facts . Legal realism is thus a jurisprudential pragmatism and at the same time shows connections to legal sociology . It was a decisive factor in the development of the economic analysis of law.
Legal realism regards the law as a means of regulating living conditions. Accordingly, law is also expressly recognized as a means of controlling social behavior .
Since legal realism does not formulate a metaphysical justification of law, it is closely related to empirical thinking and for this reason has established itself above all in the Anglo-Saxon region, where modern empirical thinking began with Thomas Hobbes ' mechanistic understanding of law .
The so-called legal realism, which can be attributed to the modern legal-realistic current, understands law as a dynamic and therefore historically open process of authoritative and effective decisions, as a factual coordination of potentially conflicting validity claims that has not been stabilized pre-historically . This is particularly evident in its application to international law ( international law ). This is not understood as a closed normative system, but rather as a factually determined process of comparing validity claims, which is not accessible to systematisation in the sense of a closed legal system - comparable to the state.
American legal realism and Scandinavian legal realism were particularly influential in the 20th century.
The main representatives of American legal realism are:
- Karl Llewellyn (1893-1962);
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935);
- Jerome Frank (1889-1957).
The main representatives of Scandinavian legal realism are:
- Alf Ross (1899-1979);
- Karl Olivecrona (1897–1980)
- Axel Hägerström (1868–1939)
- Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt (1882–1955);
- Manfred Moritz (1909–1990).
literature
- Maria Anna Rea-Frauchiger: American legal realism: Karl N. Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, Underhill Moore . Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-428-11873-1 .
- Eugene Kamenka (Ed.): Sociological Jurisprudence and Realistic Theories of Law . Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-428-05893-3 .
- Jes Bjarup: Scandinavian Realism: Hägerström, Lundstedt, Olivecrona, Ross . Freiburg 1978, ISBN 3-495-47369-6 .
- Realino Marra, Per una scienza di realtà del diritto (contro il feticismo giuridico) , "Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica", XXXVIII-2, 2008, pp. 317-46; XXXIX-1, 2009, pp. 5-30.
- Giovanni Tarello, Il realismo giuridico americano , Giuffrè, Milano, 1962.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kristoffel Grechenig, Martin Gelter: Divergent evolution of legal thought - From American legal economy and German dogmatics . In: Rabels Journal for Foreign and International Private Law (RabelsZ) 2008, 513–561.
- ↑ Martin Gelter, Kristoffel R. Grechenig: Juristischer Diskurs und Rechtsökonomie (Legal Discourse and the Economic Analysis of Law) . In: Journal for Legal Policy . tape 15 , no. 3 , 2007, p. 30–40 ( online [accessed August 5, 2019]).
- ↑ Martin Gelter, Kristoffel Grechenig: History of Law and Economics . In: Encyclopedia on Law & Economics. 2014 (forthcoming).