Further Explanation
Legal realism operates on a premise that is adhered to, often unwittingly, by most laymen and many who have legal training: that "the law," whatever that may be, is concerned with and is intrinsically tied to the real-world outcomes of particular cases. Accepting this premise moves jurisprudence, or the study of law in the abstract, away from hypothetical predictions and closer to empirical reflections of fact.
Proponents of legal realism say it is not concerned with what the law should, or "ought to" be, but that legal realism simply seeks to describe what the law is. Proponents of legal formalism disagree, saying that "law" is what is commanded by a lawgiver, that judges are not lawgivers, and that what judges do, while it might belong to the field of law, is not "law" but legal practice.
Read more about this topic: Legal Realism
Famous quotes containing the word explanation:
“My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence—I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)