In 2022, one hundred and fifty years after Charlotte E. Ray was certified as the first Black woman lawyer in the United States,1 Ketanji Brown Jackson was appointed as the first Black female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. During confirmation hearings, Jackson faced hostility over her purported embrace of critical race theory,2 echoing antagonism faced by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Senator Lindsey Graham had earlier questioned Sotomayor about whether she was “a disciple of the legal realism school,”3 bringing the arcane legal movement to public consciousness. Like literary realism, legal realism began to materialize in the aftermath of the Civil War, and its credo became Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s assertion that “[t]he life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”4 Both realist movements linked disciplinary reformation after the Civil War to debates about what citizenship meant amidst a second founding that included the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments.5 The quest for racial, gender, and economic justice that motivated many realists continues,6 moreover, as reflected in a recent ALR forum about teaching American literature from 1860 to 1910.7 Understanding the first Reconstruction's intellectual roots is crucial in the Third Reconstruction.8Over the past quarter century, law-and-literature scholarship has analyzed postbellum legal and literary developments through the lens of citizenship studies9 but discussions of legal realism's relationship with literary realism remain underdeveloped.10 Tapping into research for my book project, An Intellectual Reconstruction: American Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Formation of Citizenship, this essay first historicizes and conceptualizes the two realist movements. In summarizing and comparatively evaluating the realisms, I note points of contention among practitioners and scholars seeking to define and historicize the movements. Next I show how our history of literary realism would be enriched by engaging more deeply with legal realism, referencing my archival work and other obscure finds. Benefits could include better comprehending realist intellectual networks and literary realists’ influence on legal theory, reassessing the criteria by which we deem literary texts canonical and discerning literary realism's afterlives. Charting the interactions of disciplines “that shape and are shaped by an everchanging cultural idiom of justice”11 can help scholars constitute a more inclusive intellectual history of the realisms as a means of ultimately constituting a more equitable society. Both realisms arose from the Civil War's embers with the founding of the “Club” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the late 1860s. W. D. Howells, Henry James, and Holmes were among the attendees at the Club's interdisciplinary monthly soirées.12 The Club's emergence occurred not only in the shadow of an existential national crisis, but coincided with legal and philosophical revolutions. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, which were ratified between 1865 and 1870, expanded constitutional rights by respectively abolishing slavery (except when imposed as a criminal punishment), establishing federal citizenship, and prohibiting the denial of voting rights based on race. For trailblazing African American civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, the amendments “formalize[d] the great moral issues underlying the Civil War.”13 During the early 1870s, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce inaugurated pragmatism, which emphasizes the practical consequences of hypotheses.14 The foundation of professional organizations like the Modern Language Association (1883), the American Historical Association (1884), and the Association of American Law Schools (1900) later in the century began to solidify disciplines as higher education burgeoned. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, women's disfranchisement, the rise of the peonage system, and the Supreme Court's upholding of Jim Crow laws exemplified the failure of ideals embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments.15 Realist intellectuals thus often cast themselves as disciplinary dissenters seeking to demystify the public about inequalities.16Henry James in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) diagnosed the malady scholars of literary and legal realism would suffer in attempting to theorize the movements in this complex context. He attested: “It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being.”17 The opacity of the terms “literary realism” and “legal realism” was evident to both movements’ proponents; James, Howells, and Mark Twain ascribed different meanings to literary realism and Karl Llewellyn would in the twentieth century maintain that legal realists constituted “no group with an official or accepted, or even with an emerging creed.”18 Preliminarily, challenges defining literary and legal realism arise because “realism” is an evanescent term of art.19 Reality was perceived as destabilized in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, resulting in a paradox for intellectual movements invoking the term as realism became both “an imperative and a problem.”20 Observing how literature has historically developed from one generation of authors revolting against their predecessors’ representations of reality, Stuart Sherman suggested that “[t]he real distinction between one generation and another is in the thing which each takes for its master truth—in the thing which each recognizes as the essential reality for it.”21Given this epistemological relativism, definitions of literary realism have abounded, but they tend to be more tautological than edifying. The most common keywords are variants of “fact” and “truth”; Howells defined literary realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” and he enjoined authors to “[l]et fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are.”22 More instructive is considering the genres literary realists defined themselves in opposition to: popular sentimental literature and, depending on their form, romances. Realism was seen to reject “the fantastic, the fairy-tale like, the allegorical and symbolic, the highly stylized, [and] the purely abstract and decorative,” qualities associated with American Renaissance literature.23 Literary realism diverged from romance along dimensions including form, ideology, and content. Formally, literary realists employed “[g]raphic scene-painting, recognizable characters, and plausible dialogue and narration” to create what Henry James deemed an “illusion of life.”24 Regarding literary realism's content and ideology, Vernon Parrington—in a Howellesian passage—connected literary realists’ commonplace subject matter with their advocacy of progressive democracy.25 Parrington associated romantic literature, rightly or wrongly, with a non-democratic (i.e., unAmerican) political system, harnessing debates about literary genres to political debates.As with literary realism, legal realism's periodization and conceptualization are fluid; the movement is generally recognized as fluorescing in the interwar period, namely after the high period of literary realism in the late-nineteenth century, but the “long” legal realist era has been said to span from 1870 to 1960.26 While a more moderate version of legal realism akin to early literary realism prevailed before World War I, an arguably more iconoclastic jurisprudential philosophy that some critics see as bearing parallels with literary naturalism emerged later. The term “legal realism” was popularized by Karl Llewellyn, whose 1931 manifesto “Some Realism about Realism” catalogued the movement's premises.27 Llewellyn had studied realist literature as an undergraduate at Yale and he apparently used the term literarily.28 While Llewellyn and other twentieth-century legal realists often cited Holmes as an intellectual forefather, legal realism was conceptualized in the late-nineteenth century by several other important legal and literary figures, including Justice John Marshall Harlan, Albion Tourgée, and Charles Chesnutt.29 Drawing upon their predecessors’ intellectual activism, in the twentieth century, realist lawyers would be pivotal forces behind the New Deal and the civil rights revolution.30Legal realists’ characterization of formalism in law parallels how literary realists associated the romance genre with abstractions divorced from reality. Howells’ grasshopper analogy for a literary realist aesthetic distinguished between an idealized, veneer-laden “cardboard grasshopper,” an apt metaphor for legal realists’ view of classic legal formalism, and a “commonplace,” “real” grasshopper, which could be equated with the multi-dimensional, bottom-up perspective on law that legal realists sought to delineate.31 For legal realists, formalism could imply the inexorability of legal interpretation, thereby cloaking a decisionmaker's exercise of power. Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars (1900) illustrates a key formalist tenet that legal realists strove to countermand, i.e., that legal rhetoric reflects reality. Cedars portrays a fraught encomium to North Carolina's antebellum history: “On almost every page of this monumental work could be found the most ardent panegyrics of liberty, side by the side with the slavery statistics of the state,—an incongruity of which the learned author was deliciously unconscious.”32 A retrospective on legal realism reflected a similar critique of legal language and identified other “common points of departure” for realists: the conception of law and society in flux, with law typically behind; the notion of judicial creation of law; the conception of law as a means to social ends, and the evaluation of law by its effects; insistence on objective study of legal problems, temporarily divorcing the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’; distrust of legal rules as descriptions of how law operates or is actually administered, and particularly of their reliability as a prognostic of decision; insistence on the need for more precise study of legal situations or decisions in narrower categories, and for sustained programmatic research on these lines.33Describing the law in action along these dimensions could help close the chasm between ideals about social justice and the realities of legal justice,34 a leitmotif of realist literature.Legal realist works have methodological, substantive, and ideological qualities that ally them with realist literature, but the realisms never converged fully given disciplinary and generic differences (e.g., novels v. judicial opinions). For example, like literary realists, legal realists championed applying empirical methods to create fact-specific texts; however, unlike literary realists, their analyses tended to focus on abstract, general explanations as opposed to individual cases. Legal realists also probed the relevance of “extralegal” facts for assessing law's actual operation and they were influenced by synchronic cultural and disciplinary developments. Like literary realists, legal realists perceived that the social sciences and sciences provided tools allowing reality to be depicted more objectively. While such representations alone would not be transformative, realists held that a precondition for meaningful reform was clarifying what was to be reformed.35 Despite their interdisciplinarity, legal realists at times had a propensity to reduce complex legal questions to simple judicial ones.36 Realist literature, in contrast, often portrayed law's pervasive spectrality and not as manifested through court cases alone. Many literary realists “domesticated” legal realism by applying its tenets to the intimate sphere and everyday life to demonstrate how no realm could remain immune from oppressive laws.The most notable distinction between the realist groups may have been their exponents and areas of representational interest. While legal realism was largely promoted by white men through courts and at elite law schools that discriminated against women and people of color before the civil rights revolution and were practically inaccessible to much of the working class, literary realists were a more diverse group. Mainstream legal realists were part of an insular institutional and professional network; Llewellyn cited only men and no African Americans in his preliminary list of legal realists, for example.37 Many literary realists, in contrast, came from working-class backgrounds and were people of color or women writing from a relatively disempowered position vis-à-vis law. Several of them had law-related experiences, including through education and practice, but they generally remained outside of the power structures in which legal realists were embedded. Following from that alterity, literary realists explored a broader array of subjects than legal realists. Commercial law and socioeconomic issues preoccupied legal realists while racial and gender inequalities went unaddressed in many now-classic works despite the legal authors writing during a period when women and people of color were mobilizing for rights. Literary realism evidenced reactionary tendencies,38 but a critical mass of literature on racial and gender justice issues was nonetheless published and retains its potency. Realist understandings of law frequently permeate these texts, even by authors lacking formal legal training, suggesting the cross-pollination between legal and literary realism after the Civil War.39 In light of this comparative analysis, applying a disciplinary double-vision to literary and legal realist texts and figures may enable us to craft a more inclusive history of both realisms. The following discussion evaluates a number of artifacts, including a law review article, novel, and correspondence, to demonstrate scholarly and pedagogical benefits of construing the realisms more synergistically than is common in literary and legal studies. Moreover, law and literature movement founder James Boyd White's concept of “integration” from Justice as Translation indicates the wider ramifications of this line of inquiry. White there asks readers: What might it mean to integrate, to put together in a complex whole, aspects of our culture, or of the world, that seem to us disparate or unconnected, and in so doing, to integrate, to bring together in interactive life, as aspects of our own minds and beings that we normally separate or divide from each other? What kind of lives could we make for ourselves, what kind of communities with others?40Interdisciplinary intellectual history is in this view a personally and socially creative endeavor, and it may also serve a corrective function through recuperating figures and works marginalized from conventional disciplinary histories.41 Given that prescience and forthrightness about ongoing inequalities may have caused such marginalization ab initio, recovery efforts assume especial importance in reconstituting disciplinary, academic, and political communities today.Thinking capaciously about realist intellectual networks, including through investigating more unconventional sources, can reform our perceptions of literary realists’ influence on legal theory. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s library, for instance, contains a copy of Charles Chesnutt's Frederick Douglass biography.42 Intriguingly, prior to unearthing this link between the two literary lawyers, I had drafted a book project chapter in which I analyzed Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) in tandem with Holmes’ writings.43 I argued that Chesnutt's developing and applying legal realist tenets in the racial justice context called for scrutinizing traditional histories of legal realism centered on a coterie of white men and debates about theory, economic rights, and purported crises in legal education. Additionally, given scholarship questioning whether Chesnutt was a bona fide literary realist,44 I asserted that thinking of realist criteria more expansively would be productive, especially to the extent that conventional criteria did not fully account for the range of realisms reflected in writing by women and people of color.45 While Howells and Twain are more obvious influences, with Holmes even being invited to be honorary vice-president of the Mark Twain Society,46 Holmes’ conceptualization of legal realism was shaped by other literary realist figures as well.More direct evidence of literary realists’ impact on legal theory comes from a landmark law review article by Roscoe Pound, the Harvard Law School dean who helped spearhead legal realism before becoming a movement critic. Pound began his article “Law in Books and Law in Action” by recounting a scene from Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In the scene, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are disputing about whether to use a case-knife (as books Tom read would recommend) or a pick-axe (as Huck thinks is a more practical instrument) to rescue Jim, an enslaved man. While Huck comments about Tom's being “Full of principle” in avowing to use a case-knife, Tom grudgingly employs the pick-axe; Pound construed the interchange between the boys as emblematic of the formalist/realist debate in law.47Pound's analysis of the episode illuminates how literary realist texts could vivify legal realist concepts and impact the development of legal theory and the law itself, including into the present. Judges continue to cite Huckleberry Finn in a variety of cases, including as authority.48 The episode also depicts how race was central to the realisms even in its apparent absence. Pound's interpretation contains no overt commentary on the racial dynamics of the episode, yet the article's fundamental framing of legal realism derives from a novel engrossed with how antebellum racial inequalities persisted into the postbellum era.49 Legal realism was therefore not without its shortcomings,50 but stories like Houston's championing of Paul Laurence Dunbar attest to more affirmatively intertwined legal and literary realist histories.51 In 1915, upon being selected a valedictorian of his Amherst class, Houston chose to speak on Dunbar. As Geraldine Segal recounts, “Someone objected to this selection, commenting that many people had never heard of Dunbar. Houston replied that by the time he finished speaking, everyone would know about Dunbar. His prediction was correct.”52Foregrounding legal realism in our constructions of literary realist history could relatedly spark new conversations on canon formation, resulting in a revision of literary realist criteria to encompass previously overlooked figures and texts. Furthermore, considering literary realism as an interdisciplinary, cross-racial, and multigenerational movement could create new pairings of authors and works, which may in turn highlight the movement's contemporary resonances. Albion Tourgée, Homer Plessy's attorney in the notorious Supreme Court case upholding “separate but equal” laws, provides a prime example of how legal realism may revise our understandings of literary realist history. While Tourgée's earlier Reconstruction novels A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880)53 have seen a scholarly revival, research on Tourgée's other literary writings is relatively scant in comparison. Yet as I show in a recent essay, construing Tourgée's late novel Pactolus Prime (1890) alongside one of his posthumously published legal realist essays reveals the novel's importance in literary realist history.54 Additionally, given that the novel portrays professional racism and debates about reparations for African Americans, it has especial significance in the present Black Lives Matter era.55Archival research also manifests Black interest in resuscitating Tourgée's reputation. Citing A Fool's Errand's realistic depiction of Black experiences, Nathan Rogan, an African American man, contacted Richard Wright in 1941 about writing an introduction to a reissued edition with the new title The Puzzle of Americanism; however, Wright declined based on the project's ostensible commercial unviability.56 Rogan perceived Wright and Tourgée to be intellectual kindred spirits but correspondence between Rogan and Wright evidences the influence of pragmatic criteria on canonicity as well. Assigning the correspondence between Wright and Rogan along with texts by Wright and Tourgée could generate a lively discussion about canon formation and the complicated legacies of both literary and legal realism.57 Notably, Tourgée's metaphor of legal color-blindness, which he developed through literary and legal writings, continues to saturate political and legal discourse.58 Judge James C. Ho's concurrence in a recent major voting rights case proclaimed: “The Equal Protection Clause enshrines color-blindness, not critical race theory.”59 Seeing the “other” realism in literary and legal realist texts may revitalize intellectual history to address such paramount interpretive questions today.