The New Legal Realism and The Realist View of Law

New legal realism (NLR) furthers the legal realist legacy by focusing attention on both the pertinent social science and the craft that typifies legal discourse and legal institutions. NLR's globalized ambitions also highlight the potential of a nonstatist view of law. The realist view of law raises three challenges facing NLR: identifying the “lingua franca” of law as an academic discipline within which NLR insights on translation and synthesis should be situated; conceptualizing NLR's focus on bottom‐up investigation, so that it does not defy the rule of law; and recognizing the normative underpinning for NLR's reformist impulse.     

Piercing the Legal Veil: Commercial Arbitration and Transnational Law

The contemporary search for new forms of international governance, of which the debate around lex mercatoria is but an example, should attentively build on the lessons on public and private ordering learned in the nation state. Sophisticated commercial practices on a transnational scale, while necessitating adaptive and flexible procedures within an adequate institutional framework, involve many of the same normative questions posed by economic law in the nation state. The following article critically discusses the claims made in the lex mercatoria debate as to the rise of a transnational private law society ('Privatrechtsgesellschaft') in which political problems of exclusion and freedom have allegedly been resolved by the universal spread of private autonomy. Against similar images of a world exclusively made up of independent, self-relying market citizens, it is argued that if a conception of rights is to be rescued from the deathbed of the traditional nation state, then the learning experiences made within its confines are well worth considering in light of the pressing legitimacy needs of emerging institutions and polities.     

The Concept of Law Revised—Directives and Norms in the Perspectives of a New Legal Realism

Legal theory usually distinguishes only two kinds of legal realism: the American and the Scandinavian. Another school of this theoretical perspective is German legal realism, which refers to scholars like Ihering, Weber, and Schelsky. According to German legal realism, the author outlines what legal theory can do to persuade modern jurisprudence to face the social reality of law, conceived as institutionalized normative communication. The latter always occurs with reference to already valid and effectively operative legal norms which are used in an established, normatively binding legal practice in a given regional society.     

Children's Law: Toward a New Realism

The realist approach that has dominated American jurisprudence has long had especially great acceptance in regard to children's issues. Ironically, however, decision making on such topics has seemed to be particularly unlikely to be informed by careful assessments of social reality. Symbolism has prevailed over pragmatism. Psycholegal research on children's issues has also often been misdirected. Application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child may point the way to more psychologically minded children's law.     

论跨国公司之法律主体地位

跨国公司作为主体参与国内国际社会活动的能力与事实并存.依法律主体资格的唯一衡量标准——法是否直接赋予其权利义务,跨国公司享有国内法主体地位,但不享有国际法主体地位.对法赋予跨国公司主体地位的可能性分析须从法的根本目的出发,并结合现实社会实践综合考量.作为国内国际社会的重要参加者,跨国公司对现有法律体系下各法律主体享有权利承担义务及法所保护的社会秩序均有重大影响,这决定了其享有相应国内国际法主体地位的发展趋势.     

后现代主义与加拿大的新现实主义法学

20世纪80年代以来,后现代主义在西方蓬勃发展并对加拿大法学理论界产生影响,形成了加拿大的新现实主义法学。这种法学包含了女权主义法学理论、批判种族主义法学理论、原住民法学理论、同性(双性)恋法学理论和批判残疾人法学理论等形态。     

'New Governance' in European Corporate Law Regulation as Transnational Legal Pluralism

The present transformation of European corporate governance regulation mirrors the challenges that have been facing the EU's continuously evolving polity, marked by tensions between centralised integration programmes, on the one hand, and Member State's embedded capitalisms, path-dependencies and rent-seeking, on the other. As longstanding concerns with remaining obstacles to more mobility for workers, services, business entities and capital in recent years are aligned with post-Lisbon commitments to creating the world's leading competitive market, European corporate governance regulation (ECGR) has become exposed to and implicated in a set of highly dynamic regulatory experiments. In this context, 'New Governance' offers itself as both a tentative label and immodest proposal for a more responsive and innovative approach to European law making. The following article assesses the recently emerging regulatory forms in ECGR as illustrations of far-reaching transformations in market governance. The arguable parallels between the EU's regulatory transformation in response to growing legitimacy concerns and the recurring question about whose interests a business corporation is intended to serve, provide the framework for an exploration of current regulatory trajectories in European corporate law that can most adequately be understood as a telling example of transnational legal pluralism.     

新法律现实主义的勃兴与当代中国法学反思

本文从对美国“新法律现实主义”的评介入手,简要分析了当代法与社会研究中的现实主义立场和方法及其在世界范围的发展与意义,在此基础上对我国当代法治理念及法学中存在的问题进行反思,以提倡一种以经验(实证)研究为基本方法、从事实和具体问题出发、以解决问题为目标的现实主义法学研究方法和立场。     

重读美国法律现实主义

美国法律现实主义不仅颠覆了传统法律思维范式,而且也在美国社会转轨时期对变革美国法制和法学教育提出了初步方案.     

Legal Transnationalism: The Relationship between Transnational Social Movement Building and International Law

This article examines the compelling enigma of how the introduction of a new international law, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), helped stimulate labor cooperation and collaboration in the 1990s. It offers a theory of legal transnationalism—defined as processes by which international laws and legal mechanisms facilitate social movement building at the transnational level—that explains how nascent international legal institutions and mechanisms can help develop collective interests, build social movements, and, ultimately, stimulate cross‐border collaboration and cooperation. It identifies three primary dimensions of legal transnationalism that explain how international laws stimulate and constrain movement building through: (1) formation of collective identity and interests (constitutive effects), (2) facilitation of collective action (mobilization effects), and (3) adjudication and enforcement (redress effects).     

Realism about the Nature of Law

Legal realism comes in two main versions, namely American legal realism and Scandinavian legal realism. In this article, I shall be concerned with the Scandinavian realists, who were naturalists and non‐cognitivists, and who maintained that conceptual analysis (in a fairly broad sense) is a central task of legal philosophers, and that such analysis must proceed in a naturalist, anti‐metaphysical spirit. Specifically, I want to consider the commitment to ontological naturalism and non‐cognitivism on the part of the Scandinavians and its implications for their view of the nature of law. I argue (i) that the Scandinavians differ from legal positivists in that they reject the idea that there are legal relations, that is, legal entities and properties, and to varying degrees defend the view that law is a matter of human behavior rather than legal norms, and (ii) that they do not and cannot accept the idea that there is a ‘world of the ought’ in Kelsen's sense. I also argue, more specifically, (iii) that the objection to non‐naturalist theories raised by the Scandinavians—that there is and can be no connection between the higher realm of norms and values (the ‘world of the ought’) and the world of time and space—is convincing, and (iv) that Kelsen's introduction of a so‐called modally indifferent substrate does nothing to undermine this objection. In addition, I argue (v) that the Scandinavians can account for the existence of legal relations that do not presuppose the existence of morally binding legal norms by embracing conventionalism about the existence of the sources of law, while pointing out that in doing so they would also be abandoning their legal realism for legal positivism. Finally, I argue (vi) that the implications for legal scholarship of the realist emphasis on human behavior instead of legal norms is not well explained by the realists and appear to amount to little more than a preference for teleological interpretation of legal norms.     

Transnational Communities and the Concept of Law

Abstract. The proliferation of forms of transnational regulation, often unclear in their relation to the law of nation states but also, in some cases, claiming authority as “law,” suggests that the concept of law should be reconsidered in the light of processes associated with globalisation. This article identifies matters to be taken into account in any such reconsideration: in particular, ideas of legal pluralism, of degrees of legalisation, and of relative legal authority. Regulatory authority should be seen as ultimately based in the diverse moral conditions of the networks of community which regulation serves.     

美国法律现实主义视野下的法学教育

美国法律现实主义在法学教育领域通过批判当时主流的案例教学法而兴起,并且在法学教育实践中展开了课程设置、教材内容和师资构成方面的改革。法律现实主义者的教学改革顺应了当时剧烈变动的美国社会对于法学所提出的要求,吸收了欧陆自由法学运动、美国实用主义哲学和法律功能主义的理论精髓。它对美国乃至世界上其他国家法学教育方法的发展产生了深远的影响,促成了诊所式法学教育模式的出现。     

现实主义法学的批判与建构

法律形式主义曾是美国法学的正统,现实主义法学则从概念、逻辑、规则等多个角度对法律形式主义进行了批判,并以预测模式为中心,提出了个殊主义、目的性司法和对司法过程进行经验主义探究等改革主张,对美国法理学的未来走向影响深远。