ONLINE CLASS TASK- 17th NOVEMBER 2019

FULL NAME: SYAFINAZ BINTI IDRUS

STUDENT ID: 244653
GROUP: C

1. How do legal realism and natural science relate? (152 words)

Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law and is the view that jurisprudence
should emulate the methods of natural science, for instance, humans would rely on empirical
evidence. Hypotheses have to be tested against observations of the world.
Brian Leiter has recently called for the adoption of what he termed naturalized
jurisprudence, an idea with close ties to positivism. He has also argued that the legal realists
were early proponents of this approach.
Legal realists believe that the legal science should investigate law exclusively with the
value-free methods of natural sciences, also called 'sciences of the real'. Leon Petrażycki and
Max Weber hold that there should exist a legal dogmatics, which is independent of legal
science proper but, this notwithstanding, can be regarded as a science in its own right and
despite its being a non-real, or formal, science. However, the focus of all legal realists is on
legal science proper.

2. What do you understand by American legal realism? (150 words)

The legal realists argued that it was impossible to induce a unique set of legal rules
from existing precedents. According to Felix Cohen, every case was different from every
other in some respect, and that judges had no alternative but to engage in ethical inquiry to
determine the differences between the case at hand and the prior case that mattered.
When the legal realists argued against the practice of deducing rules from
abstractions, they hoped to focus attention on the facts of specific cases and to understand the
development of the law in terms of each situation. Furthermore, they argued that judges
should make law based on a thorough understanding of social reality. The legal realists
suggested that judges should not make value judgments in the abstract about the substantive
content of the law. Instead, judges should closely examine the social context in which those
affected by legal rules operate.
3. Contribution of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in legal realism. (194 words)

Holmes have brought himself into constant conflict with scholars who believed that
legal duties rested upon "natural law," a moral order of the kind invoked by Christian
theologians and other philosophic idealists. He believed instead "that men make their own
laws; that these laws do not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, and that
judges are not independent mouthpieces of the infinite”
His belief that law, properly speaking, was a set of generalizations from what judges
had done in similar cases, determined his view of the Constitution of the United States. As a
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Holmes rejected the argument that the text of the
Constitution should be applied directly to cases that came before the court, as if it were a
statute. He shared with most of his fellow judges the belief that the Constitution carried
forward principles derived from the common law, principles that continued to evolve in
American courts. The text of the Constitution itself, as originally understood, was not a set of
rules, but only a directive to courts to consider the body of the common law when deciding
cases that arose under the Constitution.