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Kreitner on Mitchell on Felix Cohen & Waller on Thurman Arnold

By Lawrence Solum

Roy Kreitner (Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School) has posted Biographing Realist Jurisprudence (Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 3, p. 765, Summer 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This essay reexamines realist jurisprudence through a review of two biographies of leading realists: Dalia Tsuk Mitchell?s Architect of Justice: Felix Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (2007), and Spencer Waller?s Thurman Arnold: A Biography (2005). The essay argues that when biographies of legal realists are considered alongside their academic writing, a more robust jurisprudence emerges. Realist lives crystallize the intuition that the major innovation of legal realism was not, as generally assumed, its attitude toward judges and adjudication. Instead, realist jurisprudence is an institutionalist view of law with a focus on groups rather than individuals. Realist jurisprudence understands courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and nongovernmental groups as important loci of law, lawmaking, and legal reasoning.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on August 20, 2010 (boomark / email).