Legal Realism at Yale, 1927-1960

For more than one hundred years, Harvard’s use of the case method of appellate opinions dominated legal education. Deploring the attempt to reduce law to an autonomous system of rules and principles, the realists at Yale developed a functional approach to the discipline — one that stressed the factual context of the case rather than the legal principles it raised, one that attempted to address issues of social policy by integrating law with the social sciences.

Originally published 1986.

A UN...