From a Realist Point of View

From A Realist Point of View combines new essays with revised versions of the most important recent work of preeminent legal realist Brian Leiter. This collection offers a systematic and philosophically ambitious account of legal realism and links it, for the first time, to political realism. Throughout, Leiter engages with various legal traditions (American, Scandinavian, Italian, French) and realist thinkers, from Thucydides to Nietzsche.

Part I, "Realism about Law and Legal Reasoning," examines the problem of theoretical disagreement, the relation between legal positivism and realism, and the realist theory of precedent, concluding with a penetrating critique of the recent metaphysical inflation of general jurisprudence in America. Part II, "Realism about Courts, Politics and Morality," brings the realistic perspective to bear on courts and democracy, as well as on morality (understood as a culturally variably human artifact) and moral philosophy (treated as ethnographic data, irrelevant to political practice). It concludes with case studies of two realist political thinkers, Marx and Foucault.

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor of law or philosophy at Oxford, Yale, and the Universities of Paris X and Rome III, among others. He is the author of Naturalizing Jurisprudence (OUP, 2007), Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (OUP, 2019), and (with J. Edwards) Marx (Routledge, 2025). He is also editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.

1. What is Realism?
Part I: Realism about Law and Legal Reasoning
2. Explaining Theoretical Disagreement
3. Theoretical Disagreements in Law: Another Look
4. Postscript on Theoretical Disagreements
5. Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law
6. Realism about Precedent
7. How to Cabin the Realist Indeterminacy Thesis
8. The Demarcation Problem in Jurisprudence: A New Case for Skepticism
9. Against the Metaphysical Turn in Recent American Jurisprudence
Part II: Realism about Courts, Politics, and Morality
10. Legal Formalism and Legal Realism: What is the Issue?
11. In Praise of Realism (and Against "Nonsense" Jurisprudence)
12. Constitutional Law, Moral Judgment, and the U.S. Supreme Court as Super-Legislature
13. The Roles of Judges in Democracies: A Realistic View
14. The Boundaries of the Moral (and Legal) Community
15. Disagreement, Anti-Realism about Reasons, and Inference to the Best Explanation
16. Normativity for Naturalists
17. The Paradoxes of Public Philosophy
18. Why Marxism Still Does Not Need Normative Theory: A Polemic
19. Foucault as a Kind of Realist: Genealogical Critique and the Debunking of Human Sciences