American Legal Realism

Abstract This anthology will offer a set of readings in Legal Realism, the most influential movement in American legal history, and one which more than fifty years later remains the subject of lively debate. Realist essays and reviews, written chiefly between 1900 and 1940, are difficult to obtain. The anthology will for the first time make a wide range of Realist work generally available. The forty selections of Realist writing will be preceeded by a general introduction by the three editors one of whom (Mort Horwitz) is considered one of the preeminent scholars writing on this subject. Headnotes to the selections will provide a concise biographical note for each essayist and an explanation of the legal and political issues at stake in the selections. The anthology will also make available for the first time a comprehensive annotated bibliography which should be very valuable to an interdisciplinary group of scholars. Readings include selections from the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Thayer, Roscoe Pound, John Chipman Gray, Wesley Hohfeld, Karl Llewellyn, Arthur Corbin, Nathan Isaacs, Lon Fuller, Robert Hale, Morris Cohen, Louis Jaffe, Jerome Frank, John Dewey, James Landis, Harold Laski, Benjamin Cardozo, Max Radin, Louis Brandeis and others.