Legal realism is so fantastically obvious as this study easily shows.
The law is what judges do. So your lawyer had better know how to "manipulate" the judge.
The law is what judges do. So your lawyer had better know how to "manipulate" the judge.
It's an absolute fact that the American legal code has become more much more bloated, and in my opinion, more haphazard, disorganized, and prone to severe contradiction following legal realism becoming a popular philosophy.
It's immediately obviously true in its premise, but some of the conclusions following from legal realism seem to make the justice system worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_realism#Essential_beliefs...
Specifically,
"Belief in the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to law. Many of the realists were interested in sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of law. Karl Llewellyn's book The Cheyenne Way is a famous example of this tendency. ... Belief in legal instrumentalism, the view that the law should be used as a tool to achieve social purposes and to balance competing societal interests."
This contributes to the current culture, I think, of having 1000 page laws that nobody except lobbyists have actually read. Legal realism says, "There's a problem here, justice isn't perfect" - but then proposes a cure much worse than the disease.
Yes, legal codes do tend to get bloated. But I think legal realism has been a foe, not a friend, of a straightforward and consistent legal code.
That's before even getting into things like fad psychology getting introduced to the courtroom, where psychiatric evaluators use things like the Rorschach test to evaluate people on trial. It's frigging scary that fad social science gets introduced without vetting into the court system, and it turns the common law system from an asset into a liability. But anyways, this is a long conversation - I just wanted to point out that despite legal realism's premises being correct, that doesn't necessarily make all of the conclusions lead to good places.
Let's just say that modern justice systems are not without their faults.
FWIW I'm inclined towards liberal pragmatism, and biased with an admiration for Richard Posner, probably because I already shared his admiration for JS Mill. Posner's book 'overcoming law' is a good survey of judicial philosophies from the most conservative kinds of formalism/originalism to the most left-wing kinds of identity politics.
On a deeper level there are tactics like angling your argument to the judge's world view. (This makes judicial panels all the more important.)