New legal realism

Abstract

The subject of the study is one of the actively developing trends in Western legal thought over the past two decades, especially American, which is called "new legal realism" and positions itself both as a special variant of the "organizational paradigm of interdisciplinary research" and as a progressive empirical doctrine of law that overcomes the shortcomings of "traditional approaches to law".. The program of this direction is based on the idea of the possibility of effectively solving the problems of classical American legal realism by updating, first of all, the methodology of legal research. The study critically analyzes not only the content of the main ideas of the "new legal realists", but also an attempt to articulate the well-known developments of their predecessors, especially European ones, as a "new" direction in legal science. The methodology of the research is based on such methods of working with the ideas of foreign authors as the study of original texts, program statements (materials of conferences, symposiums and speeches), tracing the connection of past and modern teachings, analysis of involvement in the discussion of traditional issues and topics of legal issues. The conclusions of the essentially critical analysis of the content of the ideas of "new legal realism" are as follows: a narrowly focused behavioristic analysis of judicial activity with the pathos of the scale of the tasks being solved creates a paradox of the absence of a problem of law (even in the sense of classical realists) in the "new" legal doctrine; the methodology of "new realists" in the form of interdisciplinary practices and orientation to the analysis of "big arrays of data" is not something new, remaining within the framework of sociological approaches to law; manipulation of traditional legal issues leads to the reproduction and distortion of the ideas of predecessors.