From Sociological Jurisprudence to Realism: Jurisprudence and Social Change in Early Twentieth-Century America
![handle is hein.journals/valr58 and id is 1009 raw text is: FROM SOCIOLOGICAL JURISPRUDENCE TO REALISM:
JURISPRUDENCE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
G. Edward White*
T HIS Article describes the displacement of one mode of American
jurisprudence by another in the first three decades of the twentieth
century. During that period Realism succeeded Sociological Jurispru-
dence as the dominant strain in American legal thought. Although the
earlier mode was generative of the latter, the exponents of the two saw
them as antagonistic. Conceived and defined by law professors, the two
modes of thought were explicated through argument and counterargu-
ment. But their mutual opposition was not merely rhetorical; it stemmed
from differing views on such fundamental questions as the relation be-
tween morality and law and the nature of judicial decision-making.
The backdrop to the struggle between Sociological Jurisprudes and
Realists was the passage of American political, social, and intellectual
history from a period dominated by the Progressive Movement to one
dominated by the spirit of the New Deal. This change was not an essen-
tially evolutionary process, although it has sometimes been so described.1
Although the New Deal borrowed much of the rhetoric and some of the
governmental apparatus of Progressivism, its followers made some
strikingly different social assumptions from those of the Progressives.
Just as Sociological Jurisprudence was the jurisprudential analog to
Progressivism, so Realism was the analog to the New Deal.
In the comparisons between the jurisprudential modes and social
movements that follow, Progressivism and the New Deal are primarily
considered in terms of their ideas, values, and governing assumptions.
This is not to deemphasize their political or economic impact, but rather
to facilitate comparison with the mode of jurisprudence in vogue during
each of these eras. The political and economic reforms initiated by
Progressivism and the New Deal were primarily the results of what
their proponents felt to be new social insights. These insights simul-
taneously revealed themselves to jurisprudential scholars.
* Assistant Professor of Law, University of Virginia. Member, District of Columbia
Bar. B.A, 1963, Amherst College; M.A., 1964, Yale University; Ph.D, 1967, Yale
University; J. D., 1970, Harvard Law School.
'See, e.g., A. Ln x, AMERIcAN Epocn (1955); A. SCHLESINGER, Tna CoMING oF Tl
Naw DEAL (1959).
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From Sociological Jurisprudence to Realism: Jurisprudence and Social Change in Early Twentieth-Century America
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