About the realism of legal realism

Abstract

The article discusses the problems of clarifying the nature, content and orientation of legal realism, which has become a popular modern approach to understanding law, primarily related to the history of legal thought in the United States, as well as the works of some Scandinavian authors of the twentieth century. The article demonstrates that legal realism in the interpretation of American and Scandinavian authors often reproduces realism in a peculiar way as a technique of epistemological and ontological nature. As a kind of original paradigm for understanding issues of legal practice and overcoming gaps in legal regulation, American legal realism can be an interesting object of study, however, as a theoretical concept or methodological technique, it has many vulnerabilities, which are especially evident when properly reconstructing the history of legal thought. The novelty of the research lies in highlighting the problems of legal realism from a critical position, both in terms of its name and semantic content. The study draws parallels between the ideas of Marxism about the prospect of the extinction of over-the-top phenomena, such as law, and the slogans of American legal realists about the need to fight theory and conceptualism. New directions and perspectives of the analysis of the history of legal thought of the twentieth century are outlined, which make it possible to more accurately identify the actual scientific and cognitive potential of approaches claiming a realistic understanding of law. It is shown that the requirement of reasonableness and overcoming excessive dogmatism are a cross-cutting theme for the history of legal thought.