[Ads-l] Major Antedating of "Legal Realism"

[Shapiro, Fred]

I neglected to sign my name to the posting below.

Fred Shapiro


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From: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2025 9:58 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Major Antedating of "Legal Realism"

legal realism (OED 1930), realism (OED, 3.c., 1930)

1918 Evening News (San Jose, Cal.) 21 Oct. 6/2 (Genealogy Bank)  Charles S. Allen, who represents the War Service league as Associate Editor of The News, made an interesting statement in his editorial in The News on Tuesday, October 15, when he said that "It must not be forgotten that law exists only in its application to economic and social problems, and therefore that judgments are useless unless they rest upon social and economic considerations."  This is a great improvement on the old notion that Justice is a grand figure with a bandage over her eyes who never sees anything but the abstract visions within her own soul, and who never looks at any of the practical things of daily life in order to guide her in forming judgements.  This old notion resulted, and is still resulting, in much meaningless and wrong mumbling of an old formula for which something vital ought long ago to have been substituted. ... [A]n attempt has been made to pretend that the decisions of the highest bench in the land were dictated solely by certain abstract principles of law which had nothing to do with social and economic considerations.  This old pretense Mr. Allen has very properly torn aside.  His is legal realism instead of legal formalism.

NOTE:  The ancestor of the "critical legal studies" and "critical race theory" movements was the "legal realism" movement, which was the most important development in modern legal thought.  The origin of the legal realism movement, as well as the term "legal realism," has been widely credited to Jerome Frank's 1930 book "Law and the Modern Mind."  Frank taught at Yale Law School and Yale and Columbia law schools were the epicenters of legal realism.  However, the 1918 passage above, and the Charles S. Allen editorial being referenced, read as astonishingly prescient anticipations of the legal realism movement.

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